By Mulengera Reporters
It all started with Senior Advocate Asuman Kiyingi’s phone being hacked sometime last month and effectively getting taken over by cyber offenders who took charge and sent out messages soliciting tens of millions of shillings from his friends and contacts. They reached out to a lot of big people asking them to send quick money. Kiyingi was portrayed to be faced with a massive emergency out of which he needed urgent financial rescue.
Many big people sent money thinking this was real only to realize much later on that the former Minister’s phone had merely been hacked. The hackers even posted social media messages purporting to portray Kiyingi as attacking key political figures, while declaring support for their adversaries, whereas not.
In the end, he reported to Police and sent out messages notifying everyone that this wasn’t him. And making it clear that his phone had been hacked. After a long struggle, he was able to secure and recover his communication means back. But this was after a lot of misrepresentation and damage had been occassioned.
Fellow former Minister Isaac Musumba, who hails from Kamuli like him and he is battling to once again become the Buzaaya County MP, has subsequently been targeted too. And in his case, hackers must have concluded that Salaam Musumba’s husband is heavily loaded (because he chairs the Local Government Financing Commission). In the days immediately after hijacking his phone from him, they targeted effecting a fraudulent transfer of Shs300m from his bank account.
As Isaac Musumba nursed his wounds and battled misrepresentation as hackers quickly communicated to key contacts in his phone, ex-Mityana MP Kaddu Mukasa (who currently heads political talk shows-hosting on Kabaka’s BBS Terefayina TV) was also targeted.
Kaddu Mukasa has been using whatever platform available to alert everyone to beware of hackers who hijacked his phone and have been on rampage reaching out to key contacts in his phone-and in the process obtaining lots of money through false pretenses and false menaces.
What all this indicates is that UCC, which is the GoU MDA mandated with enforcing anti-hacking laws, still has a lot of work to first of all to create awareness and secondly to make such criminal acts even more risky for any Ugandan citizen to even ponder. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
