Nigeria’s most popular website has resurfaced after being forced down by a malicious cyber attack.
The site had been down for most of this week, causing a lot of addicted site visitor’s to have a temporary fit.
Founder of the site, Seun Osewa tweeted a few times over the past few days about the incident in order to pass information across to the over 1.26 million members of the site, and the other guests who routinely visit.
A few of his tweets suggested that it was a malicious attack and that emails of members of the Forum had been compromised.
I am so sorry.
— Seun Osewa (@seunosewa) June 22, 2014
It may be worse than you think.
It may take much longer than you expect.
— Seun Osewa (@seunosewa) June 23, 2014
We failed to protect what you entrusted to us. We tried, but we failed. We wish we would have been the only ones affected by our failure.
— Seun Osewa (@seunosewa) June 24, 2014
Osewa’s statement, “We failed to protect what you entrusted to us. We tried, but we failed. We wish we would have been the only ones affected by our failure”, is being taken to mean the personal emails of the over 1.26 members who have to disclose their emails to become members.
In any event, the IT team of the company have at least managed to get the site back up and running in safe mode, for now.
A message on the site’s home page reads, “Nairaland is trying to recover from an attack that led to data loss. Please bear with us.”
It seems the attack may have also led to the loss of topics and member information as a screenshot of the site on June 21, 2014 shows 1.26 million members and 1.72 million topics.
Meanwhile at press time, the site showed only 1.18 million members and 1.52 million topics.
No official word yet from Nairaland, however Mr. Osewa has promised to make a statement before the end of the week.