How ANC website was hacked
Mosima Hack Team, the group who claimed responsibility for the recent attack of the ANC’s website, said that weak passwords and 8 security bugs made it easier to hack into the server.
“The security of the website was tough,” Mosima said, but added that the type of measures used by the ANC’s website host only took them 2 hours to crack.
“We started cracking the security around 03:30, then we created back doors and left FTP open,” Mosima said. “We came back at 17:00 to delete everything.”
According to Mosima, passwords as weak as “NelsonOliver94” were used and the web software used — MySQL and PHP — were out of date and riddled with vulnerabilities.
Asked why they didn’t deface the website, as hackers have done before, Mosima said their plan was to see what was stored on the server and delete the site’s contents.
If the ANC doesn’t “stop the circus” it is running in Parliament, Mosima has promised to deface the website next.
“Even now the hosting company simply uploaded the site back, they didn’t check for any unusual access. The bugs are still there to exploit again.”
Unwembi — the ANC website host
The ANC website is developed and hosted by Unwembi, and we asked the company about the security measures it has in place to protect the servers of high-profile sites such as the ANC’s.
“Unwembi deploys several security layers, comprising both software and hardware to protect such high-profile sites and constantly does testing to mitigate vulnerabilities,” Unwembi’s managing director Andrew Friedman said.
“This allows us to detect many attacks, which take place constantly and are thwarted,” Friedman said.
Unfortunately, this is a cat-and-mouse game where the mouse sometimes gets the upper-hand, with hackers outpacing the numerous methods that are deployed to stop them.
“We are still investigating our records and have uncovered data that will be forwarded to the authorities for further investigation,” Friedman said.
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