Saudi Arabia announces its exposure to a large electronic espionage campaign

Alsumaria News / Baghdad , 
said security officials in Saudi Arabia, Saudi spy exposure to a campaign letter and large - scale had been monitored since last February, it included five countries in the Middle East and other countries outside the region. 

The Saudi e-security center said in a statement that the kingdom had been subjected to an electronic hacking campaign that carried the technical fingerprints of the "Mady Water" group, the name used by the US company Palo Alto Networks.




Unit 42 of Palo Alto has published research showing how to use a series of interconnected attacks this year to "malicious documents" with government identities that appear to be official; to deceive users from target organizations to download documents and hack their computer networks. 

Among the documents used to deceive the victims are documents that are believed to have been sent by sources such as the US National Security Agency, Iraqi Intelligence, Russian Kaspersky Security Company and the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq , the unit said in a statement . 

The attacks targeted organizations in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Turkey and Israel, as well as other countries outside the Middle East, such as Georgia, India, Pakistan and the United States, the unit's researchers said.

The Security Center said in its statement that the attacks sought to "steal data" from computers using a "link sent through spam" to the credentials of targeted users. 

"Some malicious programs have been planted using Wethering Hole technology where the user is redirected to another Web site and the malicious file is downloaded," the center said. 

The technical "breakthroughs" provided by Unit 42 were similar to those the center said were part of attacks against Saudi Arabia. The center said it had uncovered an "advanced electronic threat" (APT). 

Saudi Arabia has been the target of multiple cyber attacks, including the attack on the "Chamon" virus. 

Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, has been attacked with an old version of the virus "Chamon"

The E-Security Center refused to provide further details on the source of the attack or the names of the organizations or entities targeted. 

"We can not confirm any link between what the center published and our research about MadiWater," said Christopher Bowd, a director at Unit 42, who told Reuters. "There is not enough information to confirm that link."