South African Police Website Hacked Over Marikana Deaths

Exclusive for World News Tomorrow reported from Johannesburg. Jimmy Bradford London

 
WORLD NEWS TOMORROW – South Africa_ A unknown hacker has attacked the South African police official website, downloading the details of the whistle-blowers who reported crime, an official has reported.  An “oversight” led to the data being kept on an insecure site, he added. This statement seems to be  ambiguous since the police officer later stated that the information obtained by the hacker had already been in the public domain, senior police officer Lt Gen Bonginkosi Ngubane said, Sapa reports.
This further raises the question to how something could be hacked if it was already in public domain. According to experts , the use of open-source intelligence information  OSINT already in public domain, cant be technically hacked and has the right to be distributed once in public domain.
The anonymous hacker declared on internet that the attack was over the failure so far to prosecute policemen who shot dead 34 miners in Marikana last August. This publication supposedly  exposed nearly 16,000 whistle-blowers who had their details published online after the cyber-attack, local media reports. Again it would be interesting to see what kind of Cyber attack has happened since the police officer Lt Gen Bonginkosi Ngubane said the information was already publicly known during his statement to media.  Perhaps they dont understand the word Cyber Attack according to IT specialist.
South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world, and police have been under pressure to build better relations with the public in order to hunt down criminals, correspondents say. Just last year Genocide Watch has placed South Africa on the scale of 6 out of 8 on the genocide watch-list.
” The information will have to be withdrawn from the sites where it was illegally posted as soon as possible” Bonginkosi Ngubane Police officer said but then the question remains on which ground such demand are made if information is admitted to be in public domain ? State Information Technology Agency (Sita) official Daniel Mashao said the hacker had accessed about “15,000 lines ” posted anonymously by members of the public.  and the questionable ‘Leak” has been closed.
“We are concerned because there is information where people have given further details to say ‘ I know about such and such a crime,’”  he  told the Press (Sapa) reported. The data had been collected on a public server, Mr Mashao added.
Security vulnerability:
Mr Mashao added. “There was a little bit of an oversight, because it should have been removed afterwards,”  In a tweet on Friday, hacker “DomainerAnon” condemned the fact that no-one had been charged with the killing of the striking workers the most deadly police action in South Africa since the advent of democracy in 1994. This of course cant be argument-ed with since its a fact that nobody has been changed with these murders and nothing will probably come from this case as many others in South Africa.
“To date no officers have been brought to justice… This situation will not be tolerated,” the hacker tweeted. thus we are we to argue ?
Nevertheless, police have closed the “leak” on their website, he said. The question what ‘leak” was it he referred to and is this perhaps port 80 commonly oped on almost all websites and above all, if it was public information prior then how could it have leaked out and from where ?
“I really do not believe that the situation has gone out of hand. The information will have to be withdrawn from the sites where it was illegally posted as soon as possible,” Mr Mashao said.  But if its  been open source information already in public then why does it needed to be withdrawn ?
A judge-led inquiry is presently investigating the August 2012 violence at the Marikana mine, owned by Lonmin, in South Africa’s North West province. The shooting caused national outrage, with many people accusing the police of using excessive force to break the protest. Police say they opened fire in self-defence after being confronted by a group of miners, some of whom were armed but CNN videos indicates a very different scenario that plaid of during the shooting.