The website belonging to Zimbabwe’s largest daily newspaper, The Herald Online, suffered a denial of service (DoS) attack some hours ago, apparently carried out by Anonymous Africa. The hacker collective is the same that attacked a South African news site earlier today. The attack on the Herald lasted only a few hours during which the site was not available at all;
Before the attack, the hackers posted an update on Twitter indicating they intended to carry a DoS on the Herald website, for reasons they did not disclose:
https://twitter.com/zim4thewin/status/344815991194267649
A DoS attack is a form of hacker attack against a website designed to consume all of a website’s resources to the point a website becomes unavailable to ordinary visitors trying to access it. According to another tweet by Anonymous Africa apparently while the Herald website was down, they used some sophisticated attacks to render “a heavily defended mirror in Texas and a IP in zimbabwe [of the site]” unavailable.
The Herald is owned by Zimbabwe’s largest newspaper publisher, Zimpapers. Zimpapers also publishes The Chronicle, The Sunday Mail, The Sunday News among other titles.
29 comments
You spelled ‘among’ wrong.
thanks 😉
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amoung
Hacktivist with without a cause….
Oh but they have a cause. Anonymous Africa have made it clear they detest those who needlessly praise Mugabe. But considering yo avatar….
Everything’s good about that avatar unless you’re a…
smurf?
lol!
+1
gay?
Yep! U r 1 of ’em who constantly bring up hate speech to throw pple off wats important. The woman has been dead 4 like ages, y should i get off on tht. I am don’t suffer frm necrophilia!
Not stuck in the past at the expense of the future and the present.
What is there to consider on the avatar other than respect….
Yeah, he respects her lyk the ANC respects Mandela!
And we all still respect Einstein
I feel very vulnerable right now. First, I found out, I have very limited control over my internet privacy with regards to Uncle Sam and now some stranger can decide whether or not I get to read my national daily. Exactly who will benefit from this cause?
Oh Chris, welcome to the digital age. You know they still sell the newspaper in print, right? AFAICG, it seems that they are a collective of like-minded individuals, who have chosen this way to express their opinions – not a lone individual hell-bent on disrupting your daily routine… but, with anonymity comes great… anonymity – so who really knows.
On a sadder note, it is a concern that Anons would prevent, in any way, the free distribution of information and opinion – something that I would have though would have been sacred to the collective. Datajacks FTW!
Well at least they acknowledged it was “heavily defended” and not a total walk over. Well done to the hosting guys and better luck next time.
Kabweza why did u remove my comment..
no comment removed. probably automatic spam detector working improperly. digging it out.
TZ i think this is not what you are suppose to do removing peoples comments specially if they are praising you..Im disappointed.
More detail is found here: http://technews.co.zw/2013/06/the-herald-has-been-hacked-third-targeted-site-hit-within-9-hours/
this for example would be detected as spam. using the comments section primarily to drive traffic to your site
thats not my site, was just trying to help other guys here, nway if its the case you can remove it i now understand
i still dont quite understand what the reasoning is behind all this… these anonymous africa guys clearly are activists who need to get their priorities re-aligned chop chop.because they really dont have a clue of whats going in zim judging from their comments on twitter (they are down again. strong protection though. i thought america boycotts zimbabwe government?)
i personally think… this was a publicity stunt just to flex some muscle.. and put their name on the scene…now they are asking for bitcoin donations for the cause.. what cause?? idiots.
and to backup that my suspicions on this being a sham.. they’ve threatened to take down mod.gov.zw in 40 minutes. mod.gov.zw does not even exist! DNS does not even exist for that domain… wow!
okay my bad, so apparently..its resolvable via google dns… and hosted by gisp. taking it offline shouldnt be difficult in any case
Trying to ascribe reasoning to Anonymous’ actions is pointless. They simply do it for the Lulz. They might try to find a high-sounding motive, but that’s just a smokescreen.
Weaknesses of this group:
– Their twitter comments have the same pitfalls twitter had.
– The group seems to respond in person and solicit suggestions for targets from followers.
– They hardly conform to the few general rules most Anonymous groups loosely agree on. Especially that concerning the attack of media sites like IOL. This, notwithstanding the fact that they misunderstood how IOL works. It just consolidates news from everywhere. Pro every party
– They are focused on a narrowed down picture of the Zim political problem. The midlands/matabeleland issue. Not to say it is not important.
– If they are not truly anonymous and overdo it and attack every other site or organisation, they may invite trouble to themselves.
– Their twitter comments have the same pitfalls twitter LulzSec had
[…] no indication that this Anonymous Zimbabwe is affiliated to the Anonymous Africa outfit that hacked websites both abroad and in Zimbabwe some years ago through DoS […]