Anonymous Africa shuts down the website of Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu-PF party

Yesterday, Wednesday, July 6, 2016, Pulse Tech reported that WhatsApp had been shut down in the troubled country after civil servants embarked on a nationwide strike to protest food shortages and other grievances. Anonymous Africa took down the Zanu-PF website as its own way of supporting the protests.

As at around 5pm on Wednesday, www.zim.gov.zw, www.zanupf.org.zw, and www.zbc.co.zw were all unavailable.

Last month, the group, popular for taking down websites of organizations it deems corrupt or racist, had alluded that the websites of Zanu-PF are potential targets.

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Despite seeming efforts of the government to shut down social media support for the protests, #ZimShutDown2016 was trending all day in the country.

Anonymous Africa is also responsible for taking down the website of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) after the Corporation said it would not show protests videos.

In an interview with MyBroadband last month, the group said, "Right now anything ANC, ZANU-PF, or EFF is fair game to us."

Anonymous Africa's most prominent mode of attack is known as a DNS reflection attack, which is essentially a reflection-based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack common in many website attacks. Websites are flooded with requests, making them crash.