Dubai’s e-government web support team has successfully repulsed a series of attacks thought to have come from an extremist group based in Turkey, reports in the Gulf State have claimed. According to the Gulf News, the hackers managed to break into several sites, including one for the Dubai International Quran Awards. In order to carry out the break-in hackers used a vulnerability in one of the sites, which resulted in that site being down for three days.
The attack lasted for a couple of hours, after which the security team succeeded in blocking it. Some services were temporarily affected and some data held on the sites that were targeted was lost. However no confidential information was exposed in the incident, which was the second attack on Dubai’s e-government websites in a couple of weeks. According to Dubai eGovernment representatives, this was the first successful attack on their systems, even though it did not do much damage. "Dubai eGovernment adopts a high-security system to prevent hacking, but this doesn't mean that it is completely impregnable as there are always vulnerabilities with software and networks," said Salem Al Shair, director of e-services at the organisation.
It is believed that the hacking group responsible for the security breach is Turkish in origin and carried out the attack as an act of political protest. Messages in Turkish were left on the hacked sites with what are thought to be approving references to the murder last January of Armenian-Turkish journalist and writer Hrant Dink.
No comments:
Post a Comment