Yesterday, I noted a report on Softpedia claiming that Anonymous had hacked and leaked data from Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited. It appears the company is denying that they’ve had any breach. Athuman Mtulya reports:
However, TTCL Public Relations Manager Nicodemus Mushi told The Citizen yesterday that they had not traced any breach of their systems and had not seen any leaked files online.
“We learnt of the hacking claims on Monday night and our technicians immediately probed the matter, but as we are speaking now, we have not detected any signs of an attack. We’re sure that all our files are safe and secure,” Mr Mushi said in a telephone interview.
Softpedia has subsequently updated its article. The update says, in relevant part:
The company said it only has around 1,600 employees, not 64,000. We looked at the data and discovered numerous duplicate entries, which validates their claim, and we’ll be more than happy to point TTCL’s team to the links if they would have answered our initial email.
UPDATE 2: Some more clarifications on our initial report. Before publishing, we’ve spent quite some time searching through the data and identifying if the details led back to real TTCL employees, but we didn’t check for duplicate entries, since we haven’t seen any duplicates from the World Hacker Team group until now. The real headcount is 2,287. We’ve also sent a second email to TTCL, this time containing links to the data dump so they could investigate and discover what the group accessed.
So it seems Softpedia is convinced that there was a hack and data dump, but TTCL has yet to acknowledge/confirm the breach (perhaps because they couldn’t find the data dump?).
From the allafrica article:
“I don’t see TTCL being particularly prone to cyber attacks. They are using fixed networks…you can’t breach their systems, unless you cut the cables manually. Almost all government data is stored this way for protection,”
Thats’s just hillarious
Some days I’ll regret not opening a site just for such gems.