Saudi Arabians hack Wikileaks

OurMine took over its web address.

WikiLeaks suffered an embarrassing cyber-attack when Saudi Arabian based hacking group OurMine took over its web address.

Visitors to WikiLeaks.org were redirected to a page created by OurMine which claimed that the attack was a response to a challenge from the organisation to hack them.

The “hack” was a low-tech affair, which is all the more funny because Wikileaks makes a big deal about its high-level security. OurMine used “DNS poisoning” and it happened on Thursday. Rather than attacking WikiLeaks’ servers directly, they  convinced one or more DNS servers, which are responsible for turning the human-readable “wikileaks.org” web address into a machine-readable string of numbers that tells a computer where to connect, to alter their records.

An OurMine spokesperson said the attack was DNS poisoning, carried out through hacking Wikileaks’ domain provider.

It’s the third time the hackers have gone after WikiLeaks, after twice launching a DDoS attack – a form of cyber-attack where a site is overloaded with connections in an attempt to bring it to its knees – against the organisation, in December 2015 and July 2016.

That spat caused Anonymous, the online collective, to post personal information of individuals they claimed to be members of OurMine. That backfired when the doxing got the wrong people.

It’s the latest in a string of high-profile yet ultimately low impact attacks from OurMine, which first rose to fame after hacking the social media accounts of a string of tech titans in the summer of 2016. Mark Zuckerberg, Dick Costolo, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai were amongst those who had embarrassing messages posted to their feeds.

The WikiLeaks Task Force, a semi-official account linked to the group, dismissed the story as “fake news” which is the standard response from anyone who does not hire a professional spinner these days and is confirmation that it is completely true.