Dec 29, 2008 : Zambia's Biggest ISP Hacked

📅 December 29, 2008 - According to reports on Zambia-focused news site LusakaTimes, the country's "leading Internet service provider" ZAMNET's (zamnet.zm) website was hacked into on Saturday, but has since been restored.

The security breach is believed to have occurred on Saturday afternoon by a group of hackers called 3RqU (Turkish), which according to the report, are a "known notorious group of hackers."

During the breach, the hackers changed ZAMNET's landing page as well as gained unauthorized access to the ISP's servers, enabling them to obtain root access to the site. However, it is unknown how much real damage the hackers actually caused during the incident.

Fergie's Tech Blog posted a detailed screenshot of the hacked landing page here.

Major news sites hosted by ZAMNET were also said to have been affected by the security breach, including Times of Zambia, The Daily Mail and ZNBC TV.

Lusaka Times also noted that at the time of the hacking, ZAMNET was running an old version of Apache web server, specifically version 1.3.26, but could've been updated to the latest version, 1.3.41.

"According to some experts the old Apache server ZAMNET uses might not necessarily be the cause of the breach but it points to the lax in ZAMNET's policy on applying security updates to the software on their servers," reports the Lusaka Times.

As with any hacking incident, there were a vocal group of critics and angry customers, placing blame on ZAMNET for its lack of security or attentiveness during the incident.

A commenter named Mukupa wrote in the Lusaka Times discussion forum:

"Yes the Zambia's leading ISP has been hacked. This is not the time to point figures or turn this into a joke. But this is a wakeup call. If they think it's not worth investing in network security, ZAMNET system will be hacked so often and be used as a base of attack against other websites hosted by ZAMNET, interfering with their normal operations. Financial institutions spend as much money as they can for their network security by using biometric identification as an additional layer of security remote network access for Internet/Intranets. So if you [ZAMNET] don't like to spend money, you will need to this time to update to the version required."

Some people went so far as to blame the incident on Zambia's president Rupiah Banda.

However, others kept the finger-pointing to a minimum, like Tarzan, who wrote, "Give Zamnet a break. These things happen. The Pentagon, which is far more advanced, was once hacked. Let them learn from their mistakes and be more alert in future."