A potential attack has been successfully executed on the government Data Center that hosts sensitive servers of multiple institutions from both government and private sector.
The damage inflicted on the facility rendered it incapable of receiving incoming traffic for hours, almost the entire afternoon.
A source told Taarifa that the center’s firewall was hacked. Another source said there was “a technical problem” that “they are working on it.”
Most government websites immediately went down, including the President’s website (www.paulkagame.com) and that of the army (www.mod.gov.rw).
Hosted servers of some clients were also inaccessible.
It is not the first time that hackers target this tier 3 data center.
A Tier 3 data center is a location with redundant and dual-powered servers, storage, network links and other IT components.
It is one of the most commonly used data center tiers, where IT components are powered with multiple, active and independent sources of power and cooling resources.
It is not the first time the center is attacked.
In 2016, hacktivists from the World Hacker Team, an anonymous division attacked several countries including Rwanda.
The group breached the backend of the Broadband Systems Corporation, Rwanda’s information technology company that provides high-quality video conferencing software for the local Rwanda government.
Hackers got access to the company’s email accounts, along with its ticketing system, from where they dumped the database’s content that contained details like employee names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and phone numbers.
Some of the company’s support tickets that contained sensitive client information were leaked as well, along with some internal emails that included various usernames and passwords for some of the company’s hosting and cloud accounts, allowing the hackers to access BSC’s cPanel.
Taarifa has yet to establish more details on the nature of today’s breakdown.
