Malawi government website hacked
Malawi Government woke up to a rude awakening over the weekend when hackers got into the state’s internet hub and infiltrated almost all government departments’ website rendering the sites inaccessible.
However, government has played down the incident saying the development was a normal technical hitch.
On Sunday websites for the Ministry of Lands Housing and Urban Development, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Transport and Public Works, Ministry of Mines Natural Resources Energy and Environment and the Malawi University of Science and Technology could not be accessed.
Later in the day all ministries and departments’ websites were down which led people to suggest that it was the work of a hacker.
Director of Information in the Ministry of Information, Civic Education Tourism and Culture Gerald Viola said a few ministries in the week were able to post data on their websites before the entire system went down on Sunday.
“The IT [information technology] experts are currently working on it, once they are done you will be able to access information any time,” Viola said.
He said the government websites went down because of a technical problem which he could not explain what exactly it was.
“I am yet to establish the cause of the break down and how big the problem is but I have been told it will be back soon,” said Viola.
Viola said such technical problems are beyond anybody’s control.
“We would work on something to come up with a solution so that it should not happen again,” he said.
An IT specialist within government said how the thing happened it was possible that it was the work of hackers as it was unusual for even administrators with rights to the site were unable to access the sites.
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Government is operating without ICT, the website was outsourced and since then nobody takes control and manage. The main problem is the cluelessness by their Payroll Department which is perceived as ICT department. very shameful and embarrassing.
Your report is misleading. Just tel us what happnened not your opinion. Hacking is your opinion. Don’t you know that a server can experience problems and this affects network and you can not access internet. In fact, in Malawi internet connectivity is very poor. Do yo research first before u write becoz u r showing yo ignorance of issues
I strongly concur. Sometimes atolankhani timapanga exaggerate zinthu. Ndani angakhale busy kupanga hack website ya mw govt, what sort of information are they trying to steal? It must have been a problem with the host server or bad internet connectivity, as already stated, which caused the site to be inaccessible.
U r right @ they r simply ignorant so to say.