On the 14th of October 2015 I was driving from eket to uyo to pick up a friend when, I got a call from one of my students that his bulk SMS website was hacked and all his units he had with his provider was used up and that he didn’t know how that happened. I told him that I wasn’t at the office at the moment and will try to look at what happened to his site once I got back.
When I finally had the chance to go through his site, I noticed that messages was sent using his api to all the numbers that has ever been used to send sms on his site. The SMS had the sender ID “KONGA”, and the msg was “Get special discounts Konga.com. Visit the following link and receive up to 65% discount on selected products: www./rXe4yE”
I did some research and was able to come out with the following observations which I would love to share with other bulk sms providers, or those interested in the business. Note this are my personal observations made from my personal research. I have not had time to prove any of these stuffs and am not liable to any of the information here.

1) I feel the cause of the hack was because he was using a crack version of the afrisoft spc sms component. I have talked so much on this issue on my previous post here on naira land. https://www.nairaland.com/2247185/steps-create-bulk-sms-business I try to encourage people that are interested in the business to get the original spc component which goes for just 14,790 naira there is no need to use a cracked software which will be given u issues in the near feature. See bulk sms as a business and invest in it and you will see good returns coming out from it.

2) Some of those people that got their site hacked didn’t even know they were using a pirated software. They were deceived by those people that said they could design a bulk sms website for them at a cheap price. I see bulk sms website that are designed for as low as 10,000 naira. The question therefore is if the sms component alone cost 14,790 naira, domain name cost about 2000 naira, and the average host cost about 5,000 naira, how then do they create a bulk sms website for as low as 10,000 naira .
Please if you ever get such an offer and the person tells you he is using the original bulk sms component for your site, please run. Cos you will be facing the consequence sooner or later.

3) After going through the messages, I discovered that it was more of an advertisement for some canvas art sold on konga. I was now confused cos I didn’t see the relationship between canvas art sold in konga and pirated bulk sms website. I then did a few digging and discovered that most those canvas art were all bought from one factory. And surprisingly the owner of that factory is also the owner of estoreSMS

4) For those of us that have been in the bulk sms industry for some time, we will be aware that afrisoft has shares in the estoresms https://www.nairaland.com/694777/afrisoft-interactive-buys-www.estoresms.com and also that afrisoft is the company behind the almighty spc softwares and other beautiful products such as vogue pay that is greatly revolutionizing ecommerce in Nigeria.

With these few findings I have come out with the following conclusion.
1) As far as you are using a pirated spc software in your website, you will surely pay the price one day. So if you’re interested in the bulk sms business, ensure that the original spc component is used on your site.

2) I won’t like to go deep into the msg because Adeleke Ojikutu CEO of afrisoft is more of my mentor. I really appreciate what he is done so far in the ICT industry and Nigeria and I seriously hope to be like him or even better some day.

3) Also I will also want him to come out with a solution that will be able to make the sms component in accessible for those using the pirated copy so that the owner of the site will know that a pirated spc copy was used on their site because from my research I have discovered that the owners of this site most times don’t even know what version or type of component that was used.

4) Finally for those that feel bulk sms business is a poor man business, think again cos they are people still making more than 100k from the business monthly and mind you its just a passive source of income.


cc: lojik