Security

What did attackers break into?

How did the attackers break into it?

Who was impacted?

How was it investigated?

The Qatar News Agency was hacked into and false statements were posted. It had severe consequences, and set into motion a major diplomatic crisis in the region, which saw Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt sever diplomatic relations and cut off land, air and sea links with Qatar on June 5 last year.A fictitious Emirati company based in Azerbaijan asked three Turkish companies, which work on securing online platforms and websites, to detect security breaches in a list of online news websites including QNA. They offered to provide solutions to protect these websites against the security breaches. According to the investigation, the UAE-owned company ended its operation in Azerbaijan as soon as the data became available to it. The information was then handed over to the Saudi hacking team. In the meantime, Qatar Institute of Computerisation revealed that Saudi Arabia and its allies created about 187 new Twitter accounts during or before the day of the onset of the crisis. - AlJazeera

In 2016, the bank suffered from a massive data leak. Around 1,4 GB of information was posted online on the whistleblower website Cryptome. There are almost 15,500 documents with bank corporate files and customer information in clear text. There are passwords, credit card numbers, expiration dates, PINs, credit holder names, account details, credit limits, etc. Numerous sources verified that the data was legitimate. One of the users tried to use leaked information to log into the existing account for research purposes and almost succeeded. The bank luckily has two-factor authentication and did not let the user in. The breach also affected some of the government representatives and media outlets. Qatar National Bank reacted rather questionably. They stated that they are not going to give a comment about social media speculation. However, they added that there was no financial damage and that they will secure their systems and contact those who were affected by the breach - Cyberlands