Category Posts: Security

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are now considered the cornerstone of every economy, transforming the way business is done while significantly impacting governments and communities. ICTs have contributed to the rapid development and reformation of economies while enhancing productivity and remodelling the flow of capital.

The Daily News website is down. Again. Why they pulled it down is anyone’s guess right now. SW Radio Africa reported yesterday that the editor of the paper, Stanley Gama, had told them the website had been restored online yesterday after a month of downtime. The reason for the downtime given by the editor is that they are “making further developments and modernising in line with modern websites around the world”.

Barely a day after we posted that the NewsDay was down, we got notified on Twitter that HMetro (www.hmetrozim.com) was suffering a similar problem. The website has been hijacked by hackers.

Here’s what you see if you open the H-Metro website right now:

Soon after we posted that Alpha Media’s Newsday website was down this morning, a friend notified us there was something wrong with our website. We checked and sure enough all the articles were gone. No story at all, like it’s a new blog.

We received a tip this morning that the NewsDay website, www.newsday.co.zw, may have been hacked. Web browsers currently report that malware (malicious software) has been detected on the site and that visitors are at risk of malware infection if they open the website.

The website of one of Zimbabwe’s most read daily newspapers, The Daily News, is down. We’re told by a reader that the website has been this way since at least yesterday morning. Currently, opening the www.dailynews.co.zw address loads a ‘403 Forbidden’ page served by the web hosting company.

While sitting at a coffee shop across the street from a large Bank, a person pulls out their laptop, hacks the (secure) Wi-Fi network of the bank, and by their 3rd cup of coffee has access to a desktop computer in the bank with full local access. Sounds far-fetched? Think again. That person is now writing this article. Thankfully the entity in question had requested this test to occur, but it does highlight a very important topic for discussion: African countries are growing in ICT, fast. Are they ready for the attention they will attract from hacking syndicates and cyber criminals?

Yesterday, we posted that the South African government was considering allowing the police access to the BlackBerry encrypted messenger service (BBM) in their operations to catch criminals. The article was based on reports that the South African deputy communications minister, Obed Bapela, had said BBM posed a security risk that the government needed to “address with urgency”. The deputy minister said that the SA government wants to review BBM.

Reports coming out of South Africa yesterday suggest the country’s government is apprehensive about BlackBerry services. The South African government is proposing allowing the police access to the BlackBerry encrypted messenger service supposedly in a bid to help catch criminals.

We have a Question & Answer platform here on Techzim, where visitors can post tech-related questions and get answers from the community. We try to be there a lot posting answers as well, but we don’t know everything, so it’s really the Zimbabwe tech community (thank you guys, macd, TechGuru, FREEWORLD and all you anonymous fellows!) driving the platform.

Checking the site today, I was met with the question “any legal issues with selling pirated software(.e.g. Say from torrents)?

In the past few years we have seen major developments in the availability and growth of high speed internet services in Zimbabwe. Such developments are a characteristic of the modern information and global economic age. At the same time such developments have led to the massive development and production of all kinds of software (Web Apps, Mobile Apps, etc.) to support and enable the organisations to carry out business over the internet.

On Saturday, we posted information revealing that the hacking of the ZSE website that happened last week was at the application level. We have since received more details of the hacking incident itself and it appears the ZSE website was used by the hackers to host viruses and a phishing website.

We just got more information about the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange website hacking that happened 3 days ago. A source close to the issue says so far it has been established that the hacking happened at the application level of the website architecture. The nature of the hacking itself is not clear as the website has been shut down and the url (www.zse.co.zw) is` redirecting to the hosting company’s website.

At the end of March this year, we reported that Econet’s intention to launch BlackBerry services had attracted the interest of the government. This we observed in an article in a state owned weekly newspaper, The Sunday Mail. Yesterday, the Sunday Mail had another report on the matter. This time the paper reports that the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) has banned Econet from using BlackBerry services until it gets a license for the services.

Earlier today, a guy sent us an email on our tips@techzim.co.zw address with the subject “Security Flaw – yo.co.zw” Here are the contents of that email: