A South African business lost its new website to hackers six days after it went live. The AI tool used to build the site had left the admin password in its code, according to Domains.co.za CEO Wayne Diamond.
Diamond shared the case in a LinkedIn post. He said the client chose not to use the Domains.co.za website builder. Instead, the owners built the site with a popular AI tool that costs nothing.
“No sophisticated attack. No zero-day exploit. The attackers just read the password and walked in through the front door,” Diamond said.
He said the site looked good, but much of it did not work. Then it was gone.
The owners asked the Domains.co.za support team what went wrong. The team found the cause quickly. The admin password sat in plain text inside the code of the site.
Anyone could see it by opening the developer tools in a web browser. No person had checked the code before the site was put online.
Diamond said attackers know the mistakes that AI tools tend to make. He said they run automatic scans for these mistakes all day and all night. According to him, such weak spots can now be found within hours of a site going live.
The case comes as more South Africans use AI. A Microsoft AI Diffusion report, as reported by AI Impact, ranked South Africa 46th out of 147 economies for generative AI use as of March 2026. That was the highest rank in Africa.
Ravi Bhat, commercial solutions and AI officer at Microsoft South Africa, said local AI use had climbed to more than 23%.
The same report said South Africa has more than 500,000 developers, alongside Egypt and Nigeria. More of these developers now use AI. Many turn to tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code to write code faster and fix bugs.
Rennie Naidoo, research director at Wits Business School, said pressure to deliver and a lack of senior developers make AI coding helpers look like the perfect answer. But he warned that “speed is seducing us into complacency.”
Writing for CIO South Africa, Naidoo called this habit “vibe coding”. He said it means accepting code made by AI with little checking. He compared it to flying a plane on autopilot without looking at the instruments.
Naidoo said research from Veracode and several university studies shows that nearly half of AI-generated code has known security holes.
Ian Jansen van Rensburg, head of security engineering for Africa at Check Point Software, said earlier in 2026 that criminals target sites built with Claude or Google’s Gemini. He said the attackers’ own AI tools can read and understand the code behind these sites. This turns newly launched sites into ways to break in.
“Hackers are using AI, and their attacks are now at the speed of a machine and not a human,” he said. “These things get exploited very quickly.”
Source: this article is based on reporting by iAfrica.com. Image: iAfrica.com. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.