The national broadcaster, Kenya Broadcasting Channel (KBC), has confirmed its X (formally Twitter) account has been hacked. The account has been paralysed for more than 17 hours.
The account, which boasts of over 800,000 followers, suffered the hack late on Friday, January 31. Hackers changed the account from its normal handle ‘KCBChannel1’ to ‘DeepSeek AI’.
Distraught Kenyans took to social media to inform of the unfortunate event, wondering what was going on.
In an official statement on its sister station, KBC Radio Taifa, the media house clarified that its main page was indeed hacked and they were working on restoring it to normalcy.
“KBCChannel 1’s X account was compromised, and we are actively working to restore full access. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and advise caution when engaging with recent posts from the account,” the broadcasting corporation informed.
A spot check by Kenyans.co.ke revealed that the account had been taken over by cryptocurrency scammers who changed the handle to ‘DeepSeek AI’.
DeepSeek AI is China’s equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGTP. DeepSeek has had a meteoric rise in recent days.
According to The Hackers News DeepSeek AI recently left one of its databases exposed on the internet, which could have allowed malicious actors to gain access to sensitive data.
The exposure included more than a million lines of log streams containing chat history, secret keys, backend details, and other highly sensitive information such as Application Programming Interface (API) Secrets and Operational metadata.
This incident is part of a growing global trend where high-profile social media accounts, including those on YouTube, X, and other platforms, are hijacked for similar fraudulent activities.
Cybersecurity experts have long warned about the increasing sophistication of such scams, where attackers often rebrand accounts to impersonate well-known entities or celebrities to gain trust and credibility.
In some instances, scammers would hold the accounts they have hacked until they are paid to release them. This is common especially with big corporations that are targeted to pay millions.
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