On May 13, 2016, New World Hackers (NWH), a group of hackers linked with the online hacktivist Anonymous, defaced the official website of the University of Limpopo. After leaking a trove of stolen data from the South African school’s server, a page was uploaded by the activists explaining why the site was targeted.
Reportedly, the attack was conducted under the banner of operations OpAfrica, an online op launched last year against corruption, child abuse and child labor in African countries.
Since the plight began, the group has conducted several successful cyber attacks and data breaches in the last year, including the defacement of Kenyan Oil Refinery, 1 TB of data leak from Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, South African Job Portal and 64,000 workers’ data from Tanzanian Telecom Firm. This is just the latest breach to be reported.
Some of the leaked information follows:
1. A GhostBin post shows one part of the data includes exam and Intranet files uploaded on Maga.nz.
2. Another file shows personal data of 16,000 university alumni publicly available on the Internet including names of the students, surnames, ID numbers, their faculty, date of birth, department and campus codes.
3. Finally, one of the files show 1,700 entries including faculty department names, cell numbers, telephone numbers and names.
SinfulHazeCE appears to be the main person behind this attack. According to HackRead, several university students got in touch with the hacktivists and expressed their support of the successful breach, apparently because they had been treated poorly by officials of the university.
After the sensitive part of the data is analyzed and reviewed, the group will make it public. As of writing this story, the university authorities have not commented on the hack.
As Operation Africa is ongoing, it is likely that more countries will be attacked as the hacktivists expose the corrupt dealings of the governments, public and private institutions on the continent.
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