14 DAY TRIAL // A Zimbabwe newspaper website has been shutdown by hackers for three days, since this last Saturday. The Zimbabwe Herald newspaper has reported and admitted to the incident yesterday. The Herald has become unavailable after a hacker, calling himself "r4b00f", has hacked the newspaper webpage.
It appears that the hacked Zimbabwe paper is seen as a pawn of President Robert Mugabe's ruling party, ZANU-PF. As support for the widespread opinion, the newspaper has also been responsible for bringing abundant criticism to the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which won the March 29 elections. Visitors wanting to view Herald's website were redirected to another website, which belongs to a state-owned Sunday newspaper.
According to Reuters, the Herald IT Manager, Thomson Ndovie, admitted to their website having been hacked. He also stated that they were still waiting on their service providers to give them feedback and that they expected to be up and running by tomorrow. It appears that the headlines on the site were replaced with the word Gukurahundi, which refers to an armed conflict between the Zimbabwe Government and rebels led by Joshua Nikomo. This indicates that the hacker wanted to make a political statement, rather than just cause problems.
A number of Human rights groups has seriously accused Mugabe's government for the deaths of about 20,000 people. The hacking incident just comes to increase the criticism surrounding President Robert Mugabe's ruling party, ZANU-PF.
A similar incident, in which a hacker wanted to make a political statement, was reported in Chile. Allegedly, the hacker took the personal information of six million Chileans and posted it on a technology blog, where it remained for several hours. In doing so, he is believed to have wanted to demonstrate the lack of interest of government officials for security of their own databases.