14 DAY TRIAL // Barely a day has passed since the most recent Anonymous attack and the hacktivists are back with another one, this time against Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL), a state-owned company that provides fixed basic telephone services in Tanzania and Zanzibar.
As with the most recent Anonymous-attributed attacks, the responsibility for this attack is on the World Hacker Team, one of the group's most active subdivisions.
The hackers dumped details for over 64,000 TTCL employees, data which includes real names, email addresses, telephone numbers, the department in which employees work, and their respective job title.
The data seems to be stolen from the company's website, because outside employee details, the hackers also dumped data for users that had an account on the site, information that included usernames and password hashes.
If you're wondering why the hackers did it, the answer is #OpAfrica, a campaign that the Anonymous hacker collective launched at the start of February to bring the world's attention to the situation of child labor and government corruption to African countries.
Many have argued that the group isn't actually helping since it's not doing anything except to hack government agencies and state-owned companies that have weak security measures, and then dump data of innocent people online, exposing them to various types of dangers.
Right now, you can see public opinion swinging against #OpAfrica as the hacks seem to cause more problems for regular users rather to the compromised governments.
UPDATE 1: TTCL has denied that hackers breached its servers. The company said it only has around 1,600 employees, not 64,000. We looked at the data and discovered numerous duplicate entries, which validates their claim, and we'll be more than happy to point TTCL's team to the links if they would have answered our initial email.
UPDATE 2: Some more clarifications on our initial report. Before publishing, we've spent quite some time searching through the data and identifying if the details led back to real TTCL employees, but we didn't check for duplicate entries, since we haven't seen any duplicates from the World Hacker Team group until now. The real headcount is 2,287. We've also sent a second email to TTCL, this time containing links to the data dump so they could investigate and discover what the group accessed.
UPDATE 3: The World Hacker Team has also published a response regarding the recent incident.
