SABC suffers weekend cyber attack from Anonymous Africa

The SABC isn’t having a very good month. After announcing a broadcast ban on protests, and its recent decision to ban newspaper reading on broadcasts too, the broadcaster has felt the wrath of a few on the internet.

An Anonymous Africa hacker going by the Twitter handle @zim4thewin, brought a number of the SABC’s web sites to a halt on Sunday. This included the SABC’s primary website, and sub-sites of radio broadcasters 5FM and SAFM.

At the time of writing, we still received timeout errors while trying to access SABC’s primary website.

The hacker claimed that the attack was made in response to the SABC’s recent sweeping censorship moves.

“Journalists, if you are bored. Tomorrow, at around lunch time, the SABC will be on the receiving end of largest DDoS attack to hit SA ever,” the account tweeted on Saturday afternoon. Around Sunday at 4pm, the sites began to drop.

What is a DDoS attack? Effectively a digital bottleneck, a distributed denial of service attack can comprise often of thousands of unique IP addresses all

Related: SABC employee gets seriously sweary after hearing about Zuma’s jet

Zim4theWin also promised that this won’t be the last attack either.

Every time @SABC_COO censor the SABC more, we are going to come back, and keep hitting harder until @SABC_COO can not get up again. #Anonops

— Anonymous Africa (@zim4thewin) June 12, 2016

The SABC in response, called the hackers “cowards” and that the move is “a serious matter that we are not taking lightly.”

“We have stopped (for now) training SABC. We are not done yet. A lot more needs to be exposed and talked about #WatchThisSpace,” the hackers replied on Twitter.

This is not the first time we’ve seen a hack against a company or government entity in South Africa. Back in 2009, the ANC’s website came under attack, with penis enlargement and free pornography placed on the front page.