Information lost in the 2013 SMSGlobal data breach was used by an unknown hacker in April 2015 when he tried to send four million anti-Semitic messages to mobile users in the United Arab Emirates, The Guardian reports.
SMSGlobal, an Australian company that provides messaging services for businesses around the world, reported a hacking incident in 2013, when an unknown attacker managed to infiltrate its servers and steal an unknown amount of data.
While nothing had happened for two years, in April 2015, using technical details about customer accounts, an anonymous hacker broke into SMSGlobal's servers and configured the system to send over 4 million SMS messages, mostly to users living in the United Arab Emirates, using DU, a local mobile operator and SMSGlobal's UAE partner.
The SMS texts read: "Our slogan forever: Death to America, Death to the Jews."
Because the messages were forged to appear to come from DU customers and were being sent to other DU customers, the company quickly realized the issue and, together with SMSGlobal, stopped the campaign after approximately 5,000 messages had been sent.
The incident was repeated in September 2015, when the hacker attempted to send: “Mismanagement by Saudi officials was the cause of Hajjaj’s death in Mina.” The hacker was referring to the deaths of 2,000 Hajjaj pilgrims when they turned to disorderly flight near Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
SMSGlobal says the hacker who committed the 2013 attack only got his hands on account credentials, which he used to gain access to their APIs to carry out his attacks.
The company also said that after the 2013 data breach, most of its customers began to migrate to a new platform and that the recent incident was the result of the hacker using older accounts to access their systems.
