By Jacob Mutisi
According to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)Zimbabwe is one of the countries that uses the domain extension .co.zw which is administered by the Zimbabwe Internet Service Providers Association (Zispa).
ICANN is an American multi-stakeholder group and a non-profit organisation responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the internet, ensuring the network’s stable and secure operation.
The .co.zw is a domain extension that is used by individuals and private companies which include banks. Even our central bank, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, has a .co.zw extension (www.rbz.co.zw). Yet it and all banking institutions do not know where the servers are and how they operate.
I am the Zispa chairman and have not been granted access to the servers by those who have been holding the access without permission of the Zispa board.
This is a serious national security issue which should be sorted as a matter of urgency. We have a government that does not have control of one of the most important domain extensions .co.zw. There is a need for the Office of the President and Cabinet to bring the stakeholders to a roundtable and discuss the .co.zw registry as a matter of concern.
How can Zimbabwe have a Cyber Security and Data Protection Bill yet the relevant stakeholders do not have any idea as to where a national state asset that is as important as our TV and radio stations that are guarded by our security forces, 24 hours, seven days of a week, is kept?
Why this is now more vital than ever before is that on Tuesday December 14, 2021, Zimbabwe woke up to a cyber attack on the Zispa server that administers all the .co.zw. This attack was going to shut down all domains with the .co.zw extension. The Zispa team was able to fight the attack and protect the attacked server.
Following our research the attack was meant to affect Apache Log4j versions 2.0-beta9 to 2.14.1. This Log4j is an open-source Java logging library developed by the Apache Foundation. It is widely used in many applications and is present in many services as a dependency. This include enterprise applications developed within an organisation, including custom applications, as well as numerous cloud services.
An application is vulnerable if it consumes untrusted user input and passes this to a vulnerable version of the Log4j logging library.
Imagine if the attack had been successful the impact it would have had on Zimbabwe’s financial services system? Zimbabwe is a cashless society, with 96% of its transactions done through swipe, mobile money, bank transfer and other electronic methods. Zimbabwe has the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (Potraz) whose role is to protect consumers among other roles. Potraz should be taking a leading role by ensuring that the nation and companies know how the cyber space is protected, and who is protecting it.
The .co.zw registry is now a national brand and any attack on its servers is a national security threat that should be protected and its assets should be accounted for.
- Mutisi is the CEO of Hansole Investments (Pvt) Ltd and the current chairperson of Zimbabwe Information & Communication Technology, a division of Zimbabwe Institution for Engineers.
