[ 2017-05-01 ]

Ghanaweb.com, Peacefmonline.com, Myjoyononline.com and Adomonline.com have come under attack

Hackers on rampage - Target media websites
Hackers have targeted major Ghanaian news
websites, as the coalition of media houses
intensifies a campaign, for the ban of illegal
mining commonly referred to as galamsey [gather
and sell] in Ghana.

At least four major websites, Ghanaweb.com,
Peacefmonline.com, Myjoyononline.com and
Adomonline.com have come under attack in the last
three weeks.

Multitvworld.com which is also under the
Multimedia Group was also affected. These websites
were un-accessible for some time during the period
of the attacks.

Every day, various websites do get hundreds of
attempted attacks that are considered normal by
webmasters and expected, but not on a similar
scale as the one currently being experienced by
the news websites.

The Daily Graphic has gathered that the attacks
mainly originated from hackers in China and that
they were in the nature of distributed denial of
service (DDoS).

What is DDoS

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is
an attack in which multiple compromised computer
systems attack a target, such as a server, website
or other network resource, and cause a denial of
service for users of the targeted resource.

The hackers normally flood the targets with
millions of messages, connection requests or
malformed packets.

This forces the target to slow down or even crash
and shut down, thereby denying service to
legitimate users or systems. When this happens,
legitimate users are unable to visit the target
website.

Investigations ongoing

A number of the editors of the affected websites
told the Daily Graphic that investigations were
ongoing to ascertain the cause of the hacking.

“We are all gathering data. We have made a lot
of progress and will officially file a complaint
with National Security after our internal
investigations.

“There appears to be a sponsored attack on the
websites of the media houses. What usually happens
is that others go down when hacked websites revive
their operations,” a website editor noted.

Ghanaweb

In the case of Ghanaweb, the attack happened
around Easter three weeks ago and the webmasters
had to work around the clock to restore service
after some days. Ghanaweb issued a notice to
inform visitors it was resolving a technical
issue.

The Daily Graphic gathers that the attackers
demanded for a ransom but Ghanaweb ignored them.

Peacefmonline

With respect to Peacefmonline, the desktop version
of the website was not accessible for sometime and
it was only the mobile site which was accessible
during the period of the attack.

Myjoyonline

In the case of Myjoyonline.com, Adomonline.com and
Multitvworld.com, it was noticed around Thursday
that the sites were having technical issues and
for four days they were not accessible. It was
announced on the radio station, Joy FM that the
sites were having technical issues and that
efforts were underway to resolve it.

As of press time Sunday, Myjoyonline was yet to be
back online but Adomonline and Multitvworld were
back online.

Galamsey fight

The media has been at the forefront mounting
pressure for a ban on illegal mining.

Mr Kenneth Ashigbey, a member of the steering
committee of the coalition of media houses in the
fight against galamsey suspects that the attacks
were deliberate to frustrate the media’s fight
against galamsey.

Cyber attacks

There was a sense of alarm and dismay when some
state websites were recently hacked and put out of
action for a while.

The views of Ghanaian cyber security experts were
that, there could be more of such attacks on
government agencies and companies as well as on
important private establishments if the nation
does not develop and implement a cyber security
strategy to address cyber warfare, sabotage and
espionage.

Just last week the Bank of Ghana (BoG) cautioned
banks to guard against vulnerability to
cyber-attacks as a result of a growing threat of
cyber-attacks and recent instances of fraudulent
payments online.

Source - Graphic.com.gh

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