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.

 

The Pivot: Confessions of a Broadcaster

In December 2011, I made a pivot. I laid down the reigns at the boutique agency, Zwile, that I’d co-founded three years earlier with my close friend, Lwazi Khoza (who now owns and runs TruGreen Properties). I left to pursue a full-time career in broadcasting. It was a dramatic decision. You see, I’m not a entrepreneur in the traditional sense. While my interests, skills and competencies are widespread (focus requires diligent effort for me), I realised that I wasn’t the type of person for whom simply ‘running a business’ with the sole aim of making profit would cut it. Much of the work we did at Zwile wasn’t directly linked to my passion for broadcasting, or in line with my broader calling to air and amplify empowering, positive ideas and messages. Even the impressive coups we’d pulled off as a teeny-tiny, little-known agency couldn’t keep me motivated enough to carry on. I was worn-out and uninspired.

Happily, save for a few difficult seasons of self-doubt and uncertainty, my choice to change course has proved to be the right one. Given this, one might question the rationale of my new business partnership with creative director-extraordinaire, Jonathan Munnik and gifted rain-maker, Faizel Ishmail to form Crosshare Productions. Well, the three of us are convinced that the future of broadcasting lies in mastering the game-changing dynamics of the online dissemination and consumption of information. Together, we’ve worked out a model that allows each of us to stay on purpose and produce world-class new media content. My job at Crosshare? I’m the broadcaster. (I’ll share more on the specifics of what that entails in future blogs).

We didn’t start Crosshare just make awesome video content. We’re here to play ball in the global, content-driven new media arena. TV. Online. Music. Lifestyle. Entertainment. Corporate. Event. Personal. Promo. Bring it. On.

Follow Crosshare Productions on YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.