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Get a life, hackers!
09/10/2002 09:41 - (SA)
Johannesburg - Days before launching another contentious political online game, Get A Life, South Africa's leading student portal, has been deliberately targeted by an unknown group of hackers, causing the student run and owned site to go offline for two days.
The site came back online just after midnight on Wednesday.
This is not the first time the outspoken youth site has been the
target of malicious campaigns: in June 2000, the site was hacked no
less than ten times in just seven days by a group calling themselves "Hackers for the People" who were opposed to the game
"Squirt Diesel at Mugabe".
Hackers for the People threatened to "destroy" gAL.co.za if the game was not removed. The game remained on the site, and went on to attract international attention and acclaim.
"It's not certain that this was a political attack," comments
gAL group editor Nechama Brodie.
"But it's obvious someone is trying to shut us up. We have established that, of several sites sharing the same box on our server, gAL.co.za was the only one to be hit.
"In fact, the amount of traffic generated in the attack seems to indicate there were literally thousands of computers hitting the site at the same time...which means the hackers compromised several other networks and combined them to attack gAL.co.za directly, while ignoring other sites that would have been available to them.
"This was a very personal attack on gAL.co.za. While I'd like to think it was just one of our competitors, I can't imagine any of them would be big enough or organised enough to launch a campaign of this nature."
Brodie is quick to point out only the content side of the gAL.co.za portals were hit, and that none of the group's e-commerce sections were able to be brought down.
"We're taking the threat seriously, meaning we're going to develop some serious new firewalls, and get down to some serious drinking. We have several contingency plans in place to deal with the attack, and we will be
launching our game in the next few days despite these events.
"Whoever or whatever is behind this latest attempt won't affect the
overall running of the group of websites.
"We've grown into a very powerful presence online, and it's obvious some elements are threatened by that. All we can say in response is: "Nyah nyah"."
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South Africa
