ZEC’s website was hacked on the 1st of August. The hackers were protesting to the delay in publishing of results. They posted some images on the site that depicted the events of the 1st August and what had happened during the protest. Zec took down the website after just 11 minutes and confirmed that this indeed had happened.
Why was it hacked?
Seemingly the website was hacked as a way of protesting. But other suspicions have been brought up.
Sunday Mail wrote
Infiltration of the website is suspected to be machinations of a larger plot to discredit the harmonised elections.
The website is up and running now. Investigations are still being carried out to find the culprits and measures have been taking to make sure something similar does not take place in the future.
Are we lacking as a nation in terms of website protection?
There have been many cases of websites being hacked in Zimbabwe HIT was hacked and Zimbabwe Stock Exchange site too so are we worse off than other nations? I cant say exactly because even government organizations in other countries get hacked too. Just this year thousands of government websites around the world including UK, US and Australia were hacked to obtain a cryptocurrency. So I suppose it is not so easy to prevent hacking and it is a problem for everyone across the world.
Is it easier to hack a big website in Zimbabwe than other places?
What I am concerned about is if the people who hacked just decided to do so on the 1st of August and after a couple of hours or minutes were in, then thats a problem. More security is certainly needed because if you are going to hack it should at least take you a while. I think in Zimbabwe we still see hacking as something that just happens in movies. It’s time we take it seriously. If we can’t stop hacking from happening, the hackers should at the very least be caught.
Share your thoughts….. Are we ignoring cybersecurity as a nation? As a website owner have you taken any steps to protect your website?
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10 comments
Americans, British have all been hacked too are they lacking too?
We need a public code campaign. The Europe public code campaign seeks to get governments to use open source software. Improved security is one of the many benefits open source software
no, we are not lacking as a nation. fact is, certain local service providers are just useless at security and reliability. nothing more, nothing less.
To say we are not lacking as a nation is an absolute understatement of what cybersecurity is and the need to setup institutions that focus on security research.
Maybe its just because we are good Hackers
its both actually lack of expertise and desire among most manager as security requires monies the money man dont prioritise security because when hacking does happen they face no repercussions unlike in the west CEO are made responsible and often resign when it happens CEO is expected to have done their due deligence
As a web developer and an owner of a number of websites http://www.ads360.co.zw being one of them, i have learnt to make sure that web security and backups play an important role in securing and plugging vulnerablilities that can be easily exploited. Make sure you update your CMS if you’re using that and stay away from unknown 3rd party applications. Protect your access to certain folders for your website.
Fair points there, but this site you are advertising is Joomla and its not even that much secure as a platform. Why not build your own classifieds platform since you call yourself a web developer…? Also your traffic on your site isn’t much on your site for a hacker to even be bothered. But nice try, there is still a lot of work to do.
We submit some valnerabilities but they dont consider them so we take measure and try to get through those for them to notice the valnerable points
Consider our bugs and take action
LFI…..lol