The Daily News website is down. Again. Visiting it right now gives the default hosting page in the screenshot below:
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”.
We don’t find this reason the bit plausible. You don’t need to put a website offline for a month to upgrade it, especially if you’re just going to load the same old website after the 30 days.
And just to be clear, we don’t doubt that they’re working on a new website. What we doubt is that this is the reason their website was down for a month.
The Daily News is one of the 2 most popular private daily newspapers in Zimbabwe. The other is NewsDay.
Strangely, just two days ago the NewsDay website was put offline after a hacking incident. The website is still down. And yesterday, the H-Metro website too was compromised and put down for several hours.
It’s been a bad week for these media houses and their readers. Our hope is that we all learn from this. There needs to be more deliberate attention given to the security and availability of web properties locally.
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14 comments
And Zimbabwean’s prefer linux web hosts because?
Cheaper, robust.
Its free for all to those in the LulSec line of business. kikikiki
Fact is DailyNews like so many companies in Zim don’t have a web strategy and couldn’t care less. And for a media company to be floundering about on the web like this pretty much says it all about DailyNews’ web strategy. Look at South African, US, Asia, etc media companies; the web is the place to be and they invest millions to make their web presence felt and consumed by as many. For media houses print circulation is on the decline and the web is the only platform to be on. How daft can media companies in Zim and some of our African brothers be? Save for South Africa, Kenya and the north Africans!
they think there is democracy on net
In fact newspaper companies in Zimbabwe are appalingly run and the Daily News is a case in point. Most of these papers are led by cronies and spread-sheet/cost centred management with
no clue whatsoever about internet economics or of the need to stimulate a genuine, competitive innovation model based on new technology.
Forgot one thing! If TechZim can draw a steady stream visitors on a daily basis media houses like DailyNews, etc should be doing better, much, much better. After all TechZim is a specialist tech site with a target audience. Media houses have the entire planet as their audience. Wakeup guys!
Whoever is doing this is an anonymous copycat probably doing it for a reason….. I bet this hacker ain’t doing it for fun , all zim sites should find this as a warning , of coz being hacked is inevitable but the risk can be reduced by tightening the security who knows who’s nxt . I just hope they have not been hacked again
sounds like they restored it back using a back-up copy which was already infected.
I hope the hacker is not a local security guru looking for some contracts!
on the contrary l wish it is. This will create work for him her and at the same time raising awareness without extensive damage done.
l think its all to do with drive-by type of malware. These hackers wants there malware to be on very popular websites so that it can infect as many visitors as possible.
The ZBC.co.zw site seems to be down as well, though that could just be from the overwhelming amount of BS on there..justsayin..