Criminal cyber battalion terrorising Zimbabwe’s independent online news platforms

Zimbabwe’s independent online news platforms have come under a blitzkrieg of cyber-attacks from vague criminal cyber battalions which are terrorising any voice that seeks to emerge and participate in the dissemination of information that helps citizens to make informed choices in their lives.

Recently, Gambakwe Media fell victim to these online terrorists who brought down three of its servers and thus severely interfering with their operations.

Speaking about the unfortunate development on a video that is circulating on social media, Pardon Gambakwe of the Gambakwe media alleged that Zimbabwe’s intelligence were complicit in the shutdown of his websites.

In the video that he recorded on the 11^th of January 2020, he narrated his harrowing ordeal and explained the implications of these disruptions on their operations as well as on the welfare of his team and other related stakeholders. 

“Zimbabwe intelligence have developed a sufficiently developed cyber warfare program and I want to demonstrate this by what happened this week and this is a concern especially if there is someone who is working on the internet in Zimbabwe, there is a lot that is happening that is going to impact people who work on the internet in Zimbabwe especially going towards the elections in 2023.” He said

“Over the past five days, our websites here at Gambakwe.com were not working, something was just wrong and we were not sure of what was going on. We were running out of capacity and our websites were just gone down, people were not having access. We tried everything on our side and we tried everything on the sides of the hosts over three days, a great deal of disruption on our operations.” He narrated

He went on to say that when they hired a cyber-security specialist to check on what was happening, he was shocked to note that all of their three main websites had been compromised. 

“So, someone had put in codes into our websites, similar codes that allow them to just sit on our websites and they could do things like putting pressure or increasing traffic on our websites so that they could overwhelm our servers which is obviously a denial of service attack. 

They could also make some changes to settings and we don’t know how long they have been sitting on these servers and this is a very sophisticated kind of attack and obviously it’s clear who would want to come and disrupt our operations.”

In a similar fashion, we as zwnews24.com have been experiencing cyber-attacks for the past two days rendering our site to be slow and sometimes even to be non-operational as the attacks could sometimes cause system failure.

We believe that in a country like ours with rampant unemployment where some creative minds are venturing into the media for their self-sustenance and as a form of employment and job creation for themselves and others, an attempt to incapacitate them is a serious retrogressive act by the perpetrator.

Imagine receiving 6 822 emails in an hour but we were still standing and then the following day, they took it a step further and went for 157 800 emails in an hour all having 25 megabytes of attachments. 

It means whoever is doing this is serious and sufficiently resourced to see his media shutdown objective come true.

The internet can be a good virtual place where people can do so many things to better their own lives but it can also be infested with cyber barbarians who feast on plunder and sabotage as evidenced by these cyber-attacks on online news platforms.

Most disturbingly, besides the attacks on news platforms, Africa has become a hunting ground and a guinea pig for some unscrupulous cyber players.

A report on the China Plus South Africa news platform says that a global cyber security company Kaspersky has warned that the infamous Silence hacking group is targeting major banks in sub-Saharan Africa.

They further added that Silence, a hacking group that has made a mark worldwide in the banking industry does not only steal money but also goes for sensitive information.

These developments alone can show that there is serious need for both individuals, corporates and other institutions to be wary of their internet activities and security mechanisms since there are high chances that there is always somebody ready to pounce on you online for selfish interests and barbaric reasons.