Breaking: Ghana’s Ministry of Health Website nabbed using stolen WordPress theme

One thing web developers and organisations as a whole hate is to see their website taken down by hackers.

Therefore, a lot of individuals spend a lot of time and money protecting their website against hackers. This includes developers of the themes themselves.

Vulnerabilities in themes can cause websites to be hacked, so theme developers are always on the lookout to put out the best software possible.

However, when Government organisations fail to pay for themes and resort to using nulled, pirated or stolen themes, this does not only hurt developers and other tech players but also put the thousands of individuals who visit these sites in trouble and at risk of a hack.

Yawa: Ghana’s Ministry of Health Website appears to be using a nulled (stolen) version of the popular Jannah Theme, which cost only $45 or GHS 270 – when they could just have bought it.

Developers of the theme, who might be suffering from the loss of revenue from actions from organisations such as the Ministry of Health, or the developers who work for them appear to have gone “Anas style”.

The developers seem to rely on some code in the theme to check if the theme is registered and deface websites of unscrupulous individuals who want to use the theme without paying for it.

You can check out the messed up Ghana Ministry of Health site here.

As a member of the Accra WordPress Meetup group, I hope this issue is resolved fast, at least for the love of the community. However, developers, whether on WordPress or any other platform, should not be ripped off, even under the GNU General Public License v2.0 that WordPress themes and plugins are released under.