Cyber terrorists tried to silence one of the GDN’s social media activities and put us out of action for a week on Facebook as technicians at the social media giant helped tackle the issue.
The site is now secure and back in action much to the delight of our 200,000-plus followers, alongside our popular Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and GDNlife accounts which were not hit by the hackers.
“We’re delighted to be back on Facebook and know how delighted our followers must be. Thank you for your support and understanding in this matter,” said GDN Media’s Associate Editor Stanley Szecowka.
“We remain the only English-language publication in Bahrain with a verified badge from the Facebook platform.”
Facebook message to GDN followers
Facebook technicians said they had noticed ‘upon investigation, some suspicious activities’ adding that one of the GDN’s administrators had been ‘hacked’.
As a result all the GDNonline team’s passwords have been changed and members have taken advantage of extra security features, including two-factor authentication.
It’s not the first time this newspaper has been targeted. A few years back files were planted on one of our servers by hackers from Iran.
Security measures meant they were unable to tamper with the GDN’s website, but they did plant files on one of the servers.
The hackers changed the sites’ main pages and placed a message with their name and a picture of the Arabian Gulf, renaming it the Persian Gulf, a name still used by Iran, despite the GCC calling it the Arabian Gulf.
The menace of cyber terrorism knows no bounds and targets are both large and small.
The GDN reported in June that Bahrain had witnessed 5,000 cyberattacks on smartphones in 2020 with an increase during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Kaspersky, a multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider.
Researchers from the firm saw that the number of malicious attacks on mobile users in the kingdom reached 4,940 from January to June this year.
They also highlighted that Bahrain was the second most targeted nation in the Middle East last year by cyber criminals who mostly focused on financial institutions.
Earlier in the year, Bahrain’s national oil company was targeted by hackers reportedly from Iran again.
Details of the data breach at Bapco were confirmed to the GDN, following the release of a report that claimed Iranian state-sponsored hackers were behind the incident, with the deployment of a new data wiping malware.
“The attack did not have the long-lasting effect hackers might have wanted, as only a portion of Bapco’s computer fleet was impacted, with the company continuing to operate after the malware’s detonation,” said a report published by business technology news website, ZDNet.
&uuid=(email))