by Lady Michelle-Jennifer Santos, Chief Visionary Founder & Owner
May 17, 2013 (TSR) – There’s a few government websites who are facing heavy Distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack from the Anonymous. The latest victim is the Saudi Interior Ministry website, which was hacked at 4.50 p.m. on Wednesday, causing it to cease operations for about an hour due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Service was resumed at 5.58 p.m. the same day.
An official source at the Ministry of Interior’s National Center for Electronic Security said numerous government websites in the Kingdom of Saudi, including the ministry MOI website portal, “have been under synchronous coordinated attacks” and were hacked from abroad during the past few days according to the state news agency report on Friday.
Initial assessment shows that the attack came from hundred of IPs from different countries, he said.
A new hacker group called Anonymous Saudi on Twitter have claimed responsibility for the attacks on government sites and named its operation as “#OpSaudi”.
“We are Saudi Anonymous, We are #Anonymous We are the new generation of Saudis, we are not stupid, we don’t fear anyone or anything #expectus,” the hacker group tweeted on Wednesday.
The group, which started tweeting five days ago, first targeted the website of telecom Mobily after a US software engineer known as Moxie Marlinspike said on his blog that the company approached him to help them spy on costumers. The company has denied the allegation.
Few days after attacking Mobily website, the group announced plans to attack Saudi government websites. The list of their targets included the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government departments.
The affected government sites this week include Saudi Arabia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mofa.gov.sa), The Ministry of Finance (mof.gov.sa), General Intelligence Presidency (gip.gov.sa ), gosi.gov.sa, Riyadh Region Traffic (www.rt.gov.sa), hrc.gov.sa have also being targeted by the hackers.
The Anonymous Saudi also claimed they have gained access to the server of Qassim Region Traffic website (q-t.gov.sa/h.asp) and deleted the database. General Directorate of Education in Jeddah website fell victim to the cyber attack. Hackers identified and exploited the SQL Injection vulnerability in feenakhair.jedu.gov.sa.
State-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco was the victim of a major attack last year that was described as “among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date.” The virus attack is said to have erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs.
The local al-Hayat daily attributed to an Aramco source saying the attack originated in Romania. US intelligence officials later told the New York Times that Iran was the real perpetrator behind the attack, “although they offered no specific evidence to support that claim,” the newspaper said.
The National Center for Electronic Security has moved to reassure citizens and expatriates that services will not be affected.
“Specialized parties at the National Center of Electronic Security have begun investigating this and taken the necessary measures to deal with these electronic sabotaging attacks and decrease their effect on the electronic services offered by the government to citizens and expatriates,” he said.
Several government websites were inaccessible for different periods of time, and the hacktivist group repeatedly apologized to those who were inconvenienced by the attacks as many citizens depend on these website to access government services.
