Riyadh Confirms Hacking of Foreign Ministry Servers

Local Editor

Riyadh had confirmed the internal Internet network belonging to the Saudi Foreign Ministry had come under a cyber-attack.

According to Saudi media, Osama bin Ahmad al-Sanousi, a senior official at the kingdom's Foreign Ministry, made the announcement on Saturday, saying an investigation was underway into the details of the incident.

The Saudi official also downplayed the scale of the hacking incident, describing it as a limited attack.

Moreover, the confirmation came days after media reports said a group of Yemeni hackers, dubbed Yemen Cyber Army, had published thousands of highly classified Saudi government data, including identities of spies, after declaring taking "full control" over 3,000 computers of Saudi Arabia's Interior, Defense and Foreign Ministries.

"We have gained access to the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs [MOFA] network and have full control over more than 3,000 computers and servers, and thousands of users. We also have access to the emails, personal and secret information of hundreds of thousands of their staff and diplomats in different missions around the world," said the hacker group as cited in a report by Iranian Fars news agency.

"We publish only few portions of the vital information we have, just to let them know that 'truly the flimsiest of houses is the spider's house'," the statement said.

Nonetheless, Yemen Cyber Army first made headlines in mid-April when it hacked the website of a Saudi-owned al-Hayat daily based in London to protest Riyadh's deadly war on Yemen. According to a statement on the daily's website, the hackers wanted "to support Yemen revolution."

Accordingly, the group had vowed to release the entire database of the Saudi foreign ministry in the near future.

Source: News Agencies, edited by website team