Who hacked Nairaland?

Posted by Felix Okoli on Saturday July 12, 2014 at 12:9:40:

We thank God that after a few days during which Nairaland - Nigeria's biggest online forum went offline, it was able to recover thanks to a backup copy the website owner Seun Osewa made prior to the attack. I wonder what would have happened to Nairaland if no backup copy was done.

The explanation given about what really happened to Nairaland during those few days that it went offline is still a bit hazy but it seems the consensus was that Nairaland was hacked - At least that's the official explanation we got from Seun.

The big question right now is "Who really hacked Nairaland?". Who are the people or persons most likely to benefit from the hacking of Nairaland? What will anyone really gain from hacking Nairaland?

For a start, I think we can try looking into the major competitors that Nairaland is getting and one place we can look at is at the Alexa ranking for Nigerian websites.

According to Alexa, Nairaland is the number 8 most popular website among Nigerians and comes after more popular sites like Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Could it be that Google was involved in hacking Nairaland? I doubt that because is Google is bigger than that and would rather buy Nairaland than belittle themselves intro trying to hack it. Besides if bigger sites like Google and Facebook wanted to hack Nairaland, it would have been an easy thing and there'll be sure to delete the entire web hosting account too.

Could it be the other sites much lower than Nairaland in the Alexa ranking? Well, local Nigerian sites like Vanguard, Linda Ikeji's blog, Punch and Naij also are ranked lower than Nairaland. Could any of them have been responsible for trying to kill Nairaland? Well, I don't really think so since most of them apart from Linda Ikeji and Naij are newspaper websites and do really get a lot of high paying direct advertisers and do make much money than Nairaland since they got into the direct selling ad business much earlier than Nairaland did.

The other 2 much lower ranked websites like Linda Ikeji's and Naij are more closely related to what Nairaland is doing since there are mostly content websites that are not currently as popular as Nairaland and might get some benefit from a higher ranking without Nairaland in the picture.

Well, I don't think Linda would have been responsible for that unless she has some computer geeks working for her but that is still unlikely. I don't think she's too desperate for getting more advertisers since she already has enough. Could it be Naij? Well, those guys are big boys and given the rate at which they are growing, they might overshadow Nairaland within a few years with pure SEO tricks.

Who then hacked Nairaland? Could it be that a staff of one of the web hosting providers might have been bribed to do so? Could Seun have shared his password with anyone? Could his internet service provider have hacked into his Nairaland password?

Well, it can be really hard to know exactly where the source of the Nairaland hacking came from but it can be scary to think that if a large and established Nigerian website can be hacked, then others are not that safe.

One lesson website owners and administrations can all learn from this is that there is a need to do periodic backup for your website and you should download and keep a copy of your website offline since keeping it online is not always entirely safe.