14 DAY TRIAL // Members of the Anonymous group of hacktivists have attacked several official Zimbabwean websites in response to a lawsuit filed against one of the country's leading newspaper for publishing the contents of a leaked US diplomatic cable.
On December 8, WikiLeaks published a 2008 cable from the US embassy in Harare, which directly accused Grace Mugabe, the wife of Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe, and others of profiting from the illegal diamond trade.
"The CEO of a British mining company described to us how high-ranking Zimbabwean government officials and well-connected elites are generating millions of dollars in personal income by hiring teams of diggers to hand-extract diamonds from the Chiadzwa mine in eastern Zimbabwe," the cable reads.
"They are selling the undocumented diamonds to a mix of foreign buyers including Belgians, Israelis, Lebanese, Russians and South Africans who smuggle them out of the country for cutting and resale elsewhere," it added.
Following the publication of this document in the Zimbabwe Standard, Mrs. Mugabe filed a $15 million defamation lawsuit against the newspaper, an act that enraged some Anonymous members.
According to The Tech Herald, the resulting "Operation Zimbabwe" was a rather limited campaign launched by an Anonymous cell and not the whole group.
Nevertheless, the poor Internet infrastructure in Zimbabwe couldn't even cope with these relatively small distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
The government portal www.gta.gov.zw suffered intermittent downtime since earlier last week and is inaccessible at the time of writing this article.
The website of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), the ruling party in Zimbabwe since 1980, has also suffered downtime because of the attacks.
In addition to being DDoSed, the website of Zimbabwe's Ministry of Finance was defaced with Anonymous' logo and slogan "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."