Zimbabwe International Trade Fair website hacked, taken down

We established this morning that the website belonging to the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair Company, www.zitf.net was hacked. The Zimbabwean company runs the one of the largest multi-sectoral exhibitions in sub-Saharan Africa and is currently preparing for the 2012 annual exhibition to take place in less than 2 weeks.

The company has since taken the main page of the website down, but other pages, like the ‘contacts us’ page with screenshot above, are still up with the hackers’ message still showing.

From what we can tell, the website runs on the popular WordPress content management system. The hacking also doesn’t look like a deliberate target on the company but more a random scanning by malicious bots looking for un-patched vulnerabilities in content management systems. There have been many such cases locally.

We just sent some questions to the ZITF marketing and PR contacts to get more information about the hacking. We’ll post any updates we get.