A mysterious group of hackers has launched a plan to expose Saudi Arabia's state secrets. It's called the "Yemen Cyber Army," but according to Buzzfeed, it's not known if it's based in the country.
During this period, security experts are trying to identify which individuals are behind this group (Yemen Cyber Army) and what their ultimate goal is.
Everything started on April 14, when the Al Hayat newspaper's website was seized by individuals who posted threats in order to prevent Saudi Arabia from intervening in the internal conflicts in Yemen. Shortly thereafter, a group of individuals who called themselves “Yemen Cyber Army” took responsibility and soon launched a campaign on social networks with the hashtag #OpSaudi.
On May 20, the Saudi Foreign Ministry was hacked, and the next day, the Iranian news website FARS published an article in which the mysterious Yemen Cyber Army group warned that it would soon reveal the personal details and information of Saudi federal employees and diplomats. Soon, such information was circulated on the website Pastebin.com.
About a month after this incident, Wikileaks announced that indeed the hacker group was responsible for the interception of these data, which actually demonstrated the funding of Islamist groups in Saudi Arabia. Since that day, the cyber army has remained silent, refusing to answer journalists' questions who tried to approach its members.
Boaz Dolev, director of the Israeli cybersecurity firm Clearsky, claims that the group is based in Iran.
«Anyone who believes that a hacker group from Yemen managed to get into the Saudi Arabian system is delusional or doesn’t understand anything about the world of hacking today», explained Dolev, adding that for Iran it would be easier to shift the blame onto another country.
As he noted on Buzzfeed, the program used against 550 targets, half of which were in Saudi Arabia, was aimed at espionage and ‘in no case the so‑called «hacktivism» (activism through cyber‑attack). Also, many IP addresses were identified in Iran.
At this point we should note that Twitter accounts that expressed their support for the Yemen Cyber Army in 2014 claim that the Iranian government took control of their movement.
Moreover, it is not uncommon for the hacker group to have used phrases of Anonymous, either to show its unity with this particular activist organization, or to mislead regarding its real purposes.
