Apparently Saudi based telecom operator, Mobily, has been busy buiilding a system for intercepting mobile communications including Twitter, Viber and Whatsapp. They approached world famous Moxie Marlinspike for help and in a blog post, Moxie relates the correspondence he had with Yasser D. Airuhaily, executibve manager of network information security at Mobily:
Saudi Arabia is threatening to block several popular Internet chat, call, and messaging services if they don't get in line with the country's regulatory requirements.
The apps in question include Skype, WhatsApp, and Viber, according to the country's official news agency SPA.
Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco, said on Sunday that a cyberattack against it in August that damaged some 30,000 computers was aimed at stopping oil and gas production in Saudi Arabia, the biggest exporter in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The attack on Saudi Aramco — which supplies a tenth of the world’s oil — failed to disrupt production, but was one of the most destructive hacker strikes against a single business.
Although 30,000 of its computers were affected by the cyberattack that targeted the company on August 15, the CEO of Saudi Aramco Khalid A. Al-Falih claimed that none of their critical services or business transactions had been impacted.
Present at a company workshop on cybersecurity, Al-Falih has told the audience that the organization has been aware of the fact that IT poses great risks, which is why they've continually fortified their networks with “rigorous protection technologies.”
A timer found in the Shamoon cyber-sabotage malware discovered last week matches the exact time and date when a hacktivist group claims to have disabled thousands of computers from the network of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia.
Hackers from a group calling itself "Syria's Electronic Army" seized the English-language Facebook page of Saudi owned television news channel Al Arabiya and defaced it.
A survey of CIOs by Gartner's Executive Programs reveals that enterprises in the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia are increasing IT budgets expected by 14.3 percent this year. Areas of priority for the kingdom are seen as cloud computing, virtualisation and e-Government.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s lucrative IT sector – currently the biggest in the Gulf region – is expected to grow into a USD 4.9 billion market by 2015. It currently represents almost 70 per cent of the Gulf’s total IT business and has received investments in excess of USD 35 billion over the last 10 years.
Israeli hackers have claimed credit for downing websites run by the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX).
The digital operation was apparently conducted in retaliation for the hacking of two prominent Israeli sites on Monday: the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and El Al (Israel Airlines).
An alleged saudi hacker has released a new file containing credit card information belonging to 11,000 Israelis on Thursday, days after leaking a list of 18,000 such entries
In an e-mail interview with Ynet, the 19-year-old hacker said that he considers his actions "a payback" for what he described as Israel's wrongdoing.
