A senior strategist with close ties to Kenyan President William Ruto has publicly acknowledged that his Telegram account was hacked in the run-up to last year’s election.
Dennis Itumbi told the Star newspaper that he had noticed an “increase in activity” on his Telegram last year, but called it “inconsequential”.
The admission followed the publication of an investigation by The Guardian and 29 media partners into the activities of a hacking and disinformation specialist named Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces agent who, with a team of associates, sells their services to influence democratic elections.
The investigation found that Hanan used hacking techniques to break into the Telegram and Gmail accounts of political advisers close to Ruto, including Itumbi, before last year’s elections.
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The hacking of Itumbi and two other political advisers close to Ruto did not stop Ruto from winning the poll, but the participation of figures like Hanan highlights the potential risk to new democratic systems.
Hanan demonstrated his hacking skills to undercover reporters posing as consultants in a series of meetings last summer, which were secretly recorded by the journalists.
Hanan never explicitly confirmed that he was hired to work in Kenya, nor who his client might have been, but in his demo to reporters he did point to two Telegram accounts and one Gmail account linked to pro-Ruto advisers.
In a statement about the investigation, Hanan said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”
Revelations about the hack by Ruto strategists made local news headlines in Kenya. Initial disputes over the election results were dismissed by Kenya’s high court, but Raila Odinga, the veteran opposition politician defeated in last year’s election, has continued to question Ruto’s victory.
Reaction to the revelations among the political class has been tepid, in part because the national focus has shifted away from politics and toward economic challenges. Many ordinary people have tired of the repeated contestation of the successive polls in the country.
In a separate development, Odinga appears to have tried to preempt questions about the involvement of Israeli mercenaries in the elections by claiming he hired “ethical hackers” to try to provide you with proof that last year’s poll was rigged.
Odinga, the leader of the Azimio coalition, was declared to have lost narrowly to Ruto and has since repeatedly claimed that he won by a significant margin. He has made similar claims after a series of electoral defeats over the past decade, and for his claims about the 2022 election he previously relied on testimony from an alleged whistleblower within the Kenyan electoral commission, as well as alleged internal documents. This evidence has been dismissed by the Kenyan high court and independent experts.
“I had to search for ethical hackers to find out the truth,” Odinga told a Kenyan television station, according to a Monday report in the Citizen newspaper. He said the hackers were forced to leave Nairobi, the capital, to avoid surveillance, but gave few additional details or offered any evidence to back up his claims.
“We brought them from abroad and they came with their machines. They had to go as far as the Athi River, some in Kajiado, and even Kiambu, because they were being tracked for about a month,” he said.
Odinga’s claim will further reinforce fears that the use of foreign disinformation specialists has become a routine part of political competition in Kenya, as in other parts of Africa.
On Thursday, The Guardian revealed a failed plan by the Israel-based hacking and disinformation specialist to discredit Muhammadu Buhari and get Goodluck Jonathan re-elected as Nigeria’s president in 2015.
Google, which runs Gmail, declined to comment. Telegram said: “Accounts on any massively popular social network or messaging app can be vulnerable to hacking or spoofing unless users follow security recommendations and take appropriate precautions to keep their accounts safe.”
