The influential Nigerian web site and discussion forum Nigeria Village Square has been hacked by an unknown person or persons going by the name DJ Z3R0. I have long had a fear that as the 2011 elections approach, online media outlets which cannot be bought may simply be hacked to prevent them spreading negative publicity. While I am not certain that this has anything to do with the 2011 elections, I still have my doubts. Next - SaharaReporters?

Sahara Reporters, Pointblank News, Elendu Reports, The Times of Nigeria, Nairaland and others have to take precautions immediately. One can not trust our desperate politicians.

Odikwa serious. . . I did not know that they have started kidnapping websites in Nigeria as well as people. . . Nigeria village square ransom fee has been set at N10m.


www.nigeriavillagesquare.com

Nairaland may be next.

Nigeria Village Square is back!

Noted

snowdrops:

Nairaland may be next.

All the techies on Nairaland should help save Nairaland ooo. Make dem no kidnap nairaland o!!

Interesting.

desgiezd:

Nigeria Village Square is back!

Not true as at 1:35 PM GMT August 20th, 2010.

snowdrops:

Nairaland may be next.

As at the time I said "Nigeria Village Square is back" I opened that site and read an article titled "The Day The PDP Died" by Levi Obijiofor. I have just re-opened the site now and it opened.

it's still down.

isnt this the same fellow who said he hacked the nigerian reps website.

then came to nl to boast about it.


and what's with the symbol?

[size=14pt]PHP websites are the most insecure areas of the internet![/size]
Imagine a single technology accounting for "43% in 2006, 36% in 2007, 35% in 2008, and 30% in 2009" of ALL vulnerabilities Worldwide.

The National Vulnerability Database stores all vulnerabilities found in computer software. The overall proportion of PHP-related vulnerabilities on the database amounted to: 20% in 2004, 28% in 2005, 43% in 2006, 36% in 2007, 35% in 2008, and 30% in 2009.[43] Most of these PHP-related vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely: they allow crackers to steal or destroy data from data sources linked to the webserver (such as an SQL database), send spam or contribute to DoS attacks using malware, which itself can be installed on the vulnerable servers.

These vulnerabilities are caused mostly by not following best practice programming rules: technical security flaws of the language itself or of its core libraries are not frequent (23 in 2008, about 1% of the total). [44][45] Recognizing that programmers cannot be trusted, some languages include taint checking to detect automatically the lack of input validation which induces many issues. Such a feature is being developed for PHP,[46] but its inclusion in a release has been rejected several times in the past.[47][48]

Hosting PHP applications on a server requires a careful and constant attention to deal with these security risks.[49] There are advanced protection patches such as Suhosin and Hardening-Patch, especially designed for web hosting environments.[50]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Security

Abajo,
I was trying visiting NVS some hours ago and I couldn't

Looks like it was briefly restored and then went offline again. I also briefly accessed the site for a short while and can't do so again

Aigbofa:

All the techies on Nairaland should help save Nairaland ooo. Make dem no kidnap nairaland o!!

you'd be surprised, most of the techies on nairaland are certificate waving techies with the big egos

Dis Guy:

you'd be surprised, most of the techies on nairaland are certificate waving techies with the big egos

Well, the techies did not make the choice to go with the technology that was chosen for the site.