Kenya Commercial Bank Gets Hacked?

So, Episode 80 of the African Tech Round-up, aka the episode that nearly never happened, is finally out.

In an interview I just taped for the upcoming season of the African Tech Conversations series, Co-founder and Chief Credit Officer of M-KOPA Solar, Chad Larson, shared words he lives by that epitomise why I’m glad the team and I didn’t give up on publishing the podcast this week— despite the ridiculousness that made it nearly impossible to do so. “Done is always better than perfect,” he said. So, here it is.

There’s no doubt that this has so far been a bumper year for the world’s hacking community. Last week, one of Kenya’s biggest banks, the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), spent a fair amount of energy trying to convince its customers that their personal data remains uncompromised– this, following claims by a certain programmer who goes by @IrakChris on Twitter claiming to have accessed KCB’s client data through vulnerabilities found in the bank’s mobile app.

Meanwhile, Twitter, Spotify, Amazon, Reddit, Yelp, Netflix, and The New York Times suffered easily one of the world’s biggest coordinated distributed denial of service (aka DDoS) attacks last Friday which led to the sites either slowing to a snail’s pace or being knocked out altogether.

For all the details on these stories and more, tuck into this week’s show, and be sure to tell us what you make of the week’s headlines on Twitter, or via email.

 

“Cashflow Rules Everything Around Me” Alludes iROKOtv’s Jason Njoku

Launching a start-up in Africa is not for the faint-hearted. Very few promising ventures– even those that achieve solid traction, can expect to land Silicon Valley-type investment offers that might allow a founder the liberty to concentrate solely on growth, versus say, survival.

This week’s discussion is inspired in part by a recent blog post by iROKOtv Founder and MD, Jason Njoku, written in response to a question posted on a popular Nigerian tech message board by someone who was curious to know how many Nigerian startups are in fact profitable.

Tefo Mohapi and I weren’t sure of what to make of both the question and and Jason’s subsequent response to it, so we decided to bounce some ideas around to try and determine which of these three: 1) growth, 2) profitability, or 3) being cashflow positive, African startup founders should focus on in order to succeed. Consider this just the start of a very long conversation that we plan to keep applying our minds to.

A definite highlight this week was having Jovago.com Founder and MD, Marek Zmyslowski aka Chinedu join us on this week’s African Tech Round-up while he was in Johannesburg on business. It was very kind of him to let us hijack him for a couple of hours, and include his two cents on this week’s news and discussion topic.

Be sure to catch all the week’s biggest digital, tech and innovation news:

• Kenya and South Sudan are set to start work on a multi-million dollar high-speed fibre optic cable within the next two years,
• The Consumer Federation of Kenya is leading a boycott of DSTV over high cable subscription rates,
• Nigerian e-commerce platform Yudala is keen to pull an ‘Amazon’ as it plans to roll out a traffic-beating drone-delivery service,
• South Africa’s largest online news platform, News24, has finally opted to disable public comments to articles posted on their website,
• Facebook 2nd Quarter African User numbers reveal some fascinating trends,
• Singtel, Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica are joining forces to launch a VC initiative spanning Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, and 
• A quick reminder to anyone living in South Africa that public comments on the proposed new Cybercrimes and Cybersecurity Bill are to be submitted to the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development on or before November 30th.