BULAWAYO – HACKERS uploaded graphic images of victims of army brutality on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) website on Wednesday.
The hack took place whilst protests were taking place on the streets of Harare over alleged manipulation of election results by hundreds of youths supporting main opposition leader Nelson Chamisa.
Online users noticed the glitch when they were searching for information on election results that had been posted on the site.
The hackers wrote a message in red stating: ‘THE PEOPLE OF ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER FORGET 1 AUGUST 2018.”
In another post, the hackers wrote: “Z.E.C hacked by the victims of ZANU-PF.”
Six people died and 14 others were treated for gunshot wounds following the clashes in central Harare. President Emmerson Mnangagwa said he was calling for an independent investigation into the killings.
ZEC had to pull down the websites 11 minutes after the alleged attack.
ZEC commissioner Qhubani Moyo on Thursday confirmed the hacking and said gruesome images of people shot by soldiers had been uploaded.
“Yesterday, some hackers hacked our website and we pulled it down within 11 minutes when we realised that they were now posting images that were not coming from the commission. We saw images that were not our images,” he said.
This is the second time the ZEC has been hacked.
In early July, ZEC chairperson Priscilla Chigumba told a local radio station Star FM that hackers broke into the electoral management body’s database and stole crucial information on the biometric voters’ roll, escalating fears of electoral manipulation.
Chigumba said the hackers cloned the commission’s domain, which hosted the voters’ roll complete with phone numbers and splashed the data on the internet.
This raised eyebrows as to where ZEC was keeping the server housing the voters’ roll and how secure that holding facility was.
