OpAfrica: Anonymous Deface South African University, Huge Data Leaked

Anonymous hacks university of Limpopo website leaks a trove faculty and student data for OpAfrica!

New World Hackers (NWH), a group of hackers linked with the online hacktivist Anonymous defaced the official website of Limpopo university in South Africa – The hacktivists also leaked a trove of data stolen from the university’s server.

The attack was conducted on 13th May 2016 in which the homepage of the university website was replaced with a page uploaded by hackers with a brief message explaining why the site was targeted. Upon going through the deface message it was revealed that the attack was conducted under the banner of operations OpAfrica, an online op launched last year against corruption, child abuse and child labour in African countries.

The main person behind this breach is SinfulHazeCE- however, one of the hackers from NWH contacted HackRead about the breach and informed that some university students even congratulated the group for the successful hack of the university site.

Leaked data:

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 publically available on the Internet including names of the students, surnames, ID numbers, their faculty, date of birth, department and campus codes.

3 Last but not the least, one of the files show 1,700 entries including faculty department names, cell numbers, telephone numbers and names.

https://t.co/wBnJLjlAnj DEFACE AND DATA LEAK
BY @SinfulHazeCE
DATA LINK : https://t.co/tBJ4EMeIjh#OpAfrica pic.twitter.com/eMHsQ2PmdX

— SinfulHazeCE-NWH (@SinfulHazeCE) May 13, 2016

OpAfrica was launched last year and since then the hacktivists have conducted several successful cyber attacks and data breaches including the defacement of Kenyan Oil Refinery, 1TB of data leak from Kenya’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, South African Job Portal and 64,000 workers data from Tanzanian Telecom Firm.

HackRead’s previous coverage on Operation OpAfrica is available here.

Previous attacks from NWH:

New World Hackers (NWH)’s first cyber attack was on BBC when all of its online services went offline. The group then conducted a series of DDoS attacks on HSBC servers forcing the online banking and ATMs to stay offline on payday.

Stay tuned for more interesting cyber security and tech news!