The International Labour Research and Information Group's (ILRIG) Web site has been down for almost a week since an attack which knocked it off line last week Monday.
The NGO providing education, publications and research for the labour and social movements in Southern Africa says it's helpless when it comes to these types of cyber attacks.
The organisation says it has been knocked off four times already since the beginning of the year and this time around, it does not know how to fix the problem except to start building the Web site from scratch. “We started experiencing these kinds of attacks in 2007,” it says.
The organisation says it does not have enough funds or the expertise to protect its self against attacks of this nature.
The ILRIG has been at loggerheads with several organisations trying to lobby labour issues in the region. It suspects that one of the powerful organisations that it deals with might have orchestrated the attack.
The NGO says it deals with organisations in the private as well as public sectors in the region.
“We aim to bring the experiences of working and poor people in other countries to Southern African organisations, and to draw on this information to inform the search for alternative policies. ILRIG's objective is also to assist in the development of strong bonds of international solidarity between social movements and trade unions,” it says.
Digital security is a hot topic in the 21st century and NGOs should be concerned about it too, say security experts. Digital security usually poses far more subtle but dangerous threats - for example, the danger of e-mail espionage in organisations, they say.
Recently, Survival International, a human rights organisation focusing on indigenous tribal people, experienced what it calls a “massive” cyber attack, which knocked its Web site offline. This large-scale attack wiped out every trace of the Web site operated by the NGO.
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