The youth league sub-section that hosted the offensive material was taken down
DURBAN – The ANC was once again left red-faced when hackers on Tuesday gained unauthorised access to its website and posted pornographic material.
While it is not clear when exactly the hackers posted the offensive material, the security breach became public knowledge on Tuesday morning (around 8am), casting doubts on the party’s IT capabilities to secure the website.
The hackers tried to conceal the material by not uploading it on the landing page of the website. Instead, they chose the obscure sub-section hosting information about the ruling party’s youth league and uploaded the pornographic material there.
Written in Arabic, the hackers posted about 30 videos of pornographic videos featuring Arabic male and female porn actors. When a visitor logged into the website and tried to click the youth league section, the page directed one to a porn website which is a porn site hosted using the internet country code of Senegal ( which uses the code sn).
However, it appears the ANC was able to act swiftly as about 9:25am on Tuesday, the youth league sub-section that hosted the offensive material was taken down. This was while the website was allowed to continue to function without glitches
ANC national spokesperson, Pule Mabe, said they were aware of the security breach and a team has been dispatched to fix it.
“Yes (we are aware of the breach) and are attending to the matter,” Mabe said.