Zimbabwean Online news websites hacked

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Here’s what you see if you open the H-Metro website right now:

Barely a day after we posted that the NewsDay was down, we got notified on Twitter that H-Metro (www.hmetrozim.com) was suffering a similar problem. The website has been hijacked by hackers.

Like the NewsDay case, it doesn’t look like the H-Metro was targeted for any specific reason other than that there is some vulnerability in the security of the site that random hackers crawling the web have taken advantage of to inject the phishing stuff.  In fact, the hacking itself is most likely targeted at the website’s visitors than H-Metro itself.

Attacks like the one the H-Metro and NewsDay have suffered are fairly common and web security administrators need to deliberately guard against them. There are probably hundreds other cases of hijacked websites locally, only that most are not as popular and so go unnoticed.

H-Metro is a daily tabloid owned by Zimbabwe’s largest newspaper publisher, Zimpapers. Zimpapers is government owned. It also publishes The Herald, The Chronicle, The Sunday Mail and The Sunday News.