Riyadh: A hacker, residing abroad, managed on Monday to hack into the website of the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia.
Assisted by a number of others, he changed the ministry’s site homepage, replacing it with a message that read: "I'm a student living outside the country. I want you to arrest me. My mobile phone was not changed".
After half an hour the hacker changed the message to: "No protection, look for another protection." He however, did not explain what he meant.
The website of the Saudi ministry of education has been hacked into twice before, with the incidents taking place in less than 24 hours of each other.
The hackers, who call themselves, Munazamat Al Waad Al Sadiq, or the True Promise Organisation, posted a picture of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanese Hezbollah.
They wrote: ‘You still consider Shiites as infidels. He who warns is excused’. The message bears the signature of the website of Ali Al Sistani.
This second hacking incident came only two hours after an official statement from the ministry of education, which explained that the website had been fixed at 12:45am, on Saturday.
It was hacked into at 10:30pm on the same day and then unblocked again at 9am on Sunday.
Several Saudi government websites have been hacked in the past despite an anti e-crime law, which carries strict jail terms and fines.
The director of the educational media department at the ministry of education, Mohammad Al Dakheeni, did not respond to calls from Gulf News and had turned his phone off.
Phone numbers of people claiming to be members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had been put on the ministry's internet forum some time ago but were not taken seriously by the administrator of the ministry's website and forums, Awadh Zebn Al Otaibi.
