The largest online news portal in the country, GhanaWeb, is back online after suffering a hack of it’s image servers.
Information available to The Ghana Report indicates that the image servers of the rather popular news platform was hacked around 7pm on Thursday, July 18, 2019.
The portal had communicated to its readers that the site “is currently offline due to some technical challenges with our image server. Our team is feverishly working to resolve this in the shortest possible time”.
“Ghanaweb.com is currently offline due to some technical challenges with our image server. Our team is feverishly working to resolve this in the shortest possible time.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused”.
Thank you.
Sources however confirm to The Ghana Report that the site had been compromised with the hackers threatening to delete the entire image library of the website which serves as home to a number of avid readers in and outside the country.
The hackers boldly embedded their signatures on all images on stories on the website. All stories on the website had a photo with the inscription “Hacked by B45H / XC0D3R 3XPL01T3R”. It also had additional inscriptions, “Stop_corruption”, “NDC – 2020” and “Vote – NDC – 2020”
This is not the first time that an online platform in Ghana has been hacked. In 2017, four major websites; Ghanaweb.com, Peacefmonline.com, Myjoyonline.com and Adomonline.com came under attack. Multitvworld.com which is also under the Multimedia Group umbrella had their sites attacked and were inaccessible for some time during the period. This recent happening has become a major cause of concern for many.
After the 2017 hacking, the Daily Graphic had gathered that the attacks mainly originated from hackers in China and that they were in the nature of distributed denial of service (DDoS). DDoS attack is an attack in which multiple compromised computer systems attack a target, such as servers, websites or other network resources and cause a denial of service for users of the targeted resource.
The various platforms put up a similar notice to the public when they had their sites hacked.
These were the statements issued at the time:
“Peacefmonline.com desktop version of the website was not accessible to its audience and it was only the mobile version which was accessible within that period”.
“Myjoyonline.com was not accessible for four days and it was announced on the radio station, Joy FM that the sites were having technical issues and that efforts were underway to resolve it”.
“Ghanaweb.com attack happened around April 24th and 28th thereabout precisely Easter and the webmasters had to work around the clock to restore the site. Ghanaweb again issued a notice to inform the general public that it was resolving a technical issue”.
Cyber-crimes are becoming more sophisticated, sharing successful techniques and tools with other hackers.
It is one of the biggest threats facing businesses and the cost of data breaches at companies is expected to hit $2.1 trillion globally by 2019.
The number of reported credential breaches was roughly stable at 51% in 2015, compared with 53% in 2016.