A hacker who recently hit the website of the Zimbabwe government’s
daily newspaper's has now attacked the website belonging to the
Financial Gazette, writes Gugu Ziyaphapha.
The attack on the gazette comes exactly a day after the state-owned Herald managed to restore its site after it was closed down by the hacker for four days.
The hacker, only identified as "r4b00f" replaced all the gazette’s headlines in the May 15 web edition to read "Mugabe must go" and "Free Zimbabwe".
The financial weekly is owned by the Central Intelligence Organisation(CIO) and the central bank governor, Gideon Gono, both fierce Mugabe loyalists.
Hyperlinks on gazette news items directed visitors to the website of the militant anti-Mugabe civic action group called Sokwanele/Zvakwana/ (Shona and Ndebele for Enough is Enough).
The hacker who is believed to be a political activist recently wiped and replaced the Herald headlines with the words "Gukurahundi" a term used to describe the Mugabe sponsored genocide which claimed the lives of over 20 thousand civilians in the early 80s.
Some IT analysts have dubbed "r4boof" a political "hacktivist"
In the attack on the Herald, “r4b00f†replaced headlines with the word “Gukurahundiâ€ÂÂ, a Shona term used to describe the Zanu PF government-sponsored genocide which left more than 20 000 civilians dead during the early 80s.
The hacker replaced the headlines three times until the Herald finally gave up and shut down the site.
Zimpapers, publishers of the Herald and other titles say the sites of their other publications were not tampered with.
The group’s IT manager, Thompson Ndovi, says: "The indications are that somebody managed to access our servers hosted by our Internet service provider and corrupted our database so that the news headlines we had uploaded changed.
"The uploading process itself is very secure and it is up to the ISP to provide adequate security, primarily through firewalls, for our websites.†Security would be improved, he said.
