Hama Saburi, The Editor-in-Chief of The Financial Gazette said yesterday measures had since been taken to restore and upgrade the site with more security checks to avoid similar occurrences in future.

He said the website had since been restored and was functioning normally.

"We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to our readers and online advertisers as a result of the malfunctioning of the website," said Saburi.

The Fingaz website was developed about two years ago on a free and open source content management system used to publish content on the World Wide Web and Intranets.

Technology Zimbabwe, a weblog dedicated to pursuing information communication technology issues affecting Zimbabweans, noted this week that the hack on the Fingaz website by a group called HighTech Brazil HackTeam, was similar to the one that hit internet service provider ZOL last week.

And like the ZOL website defacement, last week's attack on the pink paper's website looks like a random attack on known content management vulnerabilities.

Like other newspapers in the country, The Financial Gazette's establishment of online presence has not been smooth. Websites belonging to print media companies in Zimbabwe have been subjected to defacement in such random hacks.