Safaricom detected and monitored 1.25 billion cyber intrusion attempts in the 2025/26 financial year, Group Chief Executive Peter Ndegwa disclosed on Tuesday, October 27, at the launch of the company’s 2026 Sustainable Business Report in Nairobi, as threats to Kenyan digital systems keep rising.
Speaking at the Michael Joseph Centre, Ndegwa said Safaricom had dealt with the attempts and investigated more than 130,000 security events. The report says there were no confirmed material cybersecurity breaches affecting customer data or business operations, and that distributed denial-of-service attacks were contained without material customer impact. An audit by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in December 2025 found the company predominantly compliant with the Data Protection Act.
Safaricom said it is using artificial intelligence to predict and prevent more than 94 percent of fraud attempts before they occur, and that it is combining technology controls with staff training, investigations, customer education and third-party compliance requirements.
The report names AI-enabled fraud and more sophisticated cyber threats as challenges that will need continued investment. The board’s Risk and ESG Committee oversees technology risks, including cybersecurity and privacy incidents.
One of the main tools against fraud is the Single View, or View360, platform for SIM swaps. It gives agents a central dashboard to verify identities and flags high-risk transactions, so decisions are made by the system and not by frontline agents. Safaricom says fraudulent swaps have dropped by 65 percent since it was adopted. That matters because Interpol has said SIM-swap fraud in Kenya rose by 327 percent last year, with Kenyans losing Sh491.6 million.
The company’s numbers sit against a worsening national picture. The National KE-CIRT/CC reported that Kenya recorded 11.12 billion cyber threat events in the last financial year, up 29 percent from 8.62 billion the year before, according to figures presented at Safaricom’s fourth annual cybersecurity summit on October 14. Safaricom also hosted the conference in the week before the report launch, bringing industry players together to discuss resilience as AI changes the nature of cyber threats.
The stakes are high given M-Pesa’s scale: it handled about 46.4 billion transactions worth Sh41.7 trillion in the year. The report also says customer trust in Safaricom’s privacy practices has recovered, with privacy trust scores at 70 percent for M-Pesa and 61 percent for Safaricom.
