Gugu Ziyaphapha,  writing in Journalism.co.za,  brings encouraging news of what sounds like a "hacktivist" action against the website of  the Zimbabwe government’s daily newspaper/propaganda mouthpiece,  The Herald.   The hacker managed to close down the website for four days by  removing the Herald’s headlines and replacing them with the phrase, "Gukurahundi", referring to the notorious state-directed genocide in which as many as 20 000 civilian opponents of the Mugabe regime were slaughtered by North Korean-trained forces in the early 1980s.  The hacker kept changing the headlines for three days until the Herald had to close the site.

This was followed, a day later, by an attack on the website of the Zimbabwe Financial Gazette.  The Gazette is another government-controlled media outlet, in a country where oppositional media have been driven into silence.   In this attack, "the hacker, only identified as ‘r4b00f’ replaced all the gazette’s headlines in the May 15 web edition to read "Mugabe must go" and "Free Zimbabwe".  The attack on the Gazette included hyperlinks which  "directed visitors to the website of the militant anti-Mugabe civic action group called Sokwanele/Zvakwana/ (Shona and Ndebele for Enough is Enough)."

(Thanks to Antony Kaminju for the link.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 6:07 pm and is filed under activism, africa, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.