Dubai: Details of the Qatar National Bank (QNB) hacking are still unravelling the week after 1.4 gigabytes of sensitive customer data first appeared online that purportedly includes information on Qatar’s royal family.
It took five days for QNB, the Middle East’s largest lender, to confirm the data leak was authentic. The bank says its reputation was the target and not its customers’ financial accounts.
The data dump, which was mirrored on a whistle-blower website and later removed, reportedly shows transaction logs, personal identification numbers and credit card details. Other folders in the leak provide information on Al Jazeera journalists and purportedly Qatar’s royal family and a list of alleged foreign spies working in Qatar.
A folder labelled as “SPY, Intelligence”, reportedly includes information on agents from MI6 — the UK’s foreign intelligence service, and from American, French and Polish intelligence. There are also folders labelled Al Thani, which is the name of Qatar’s royal family, Mukhabarat — Qatar’s State Security Bureau, Ministry of Defence and Al Jazeera.
The files are not all the same but many contain bank logins, passwords, security questions and answers, phone numbers, emails and Qatari national identification numbers.
What we don’t know
The identity of the hackers is not known, neither is it known whether they have made any demands.Some hackers have in the past tried to ransom the information they have stolen.
There is speculation the attackers are Turkish after a video showing QNB customer information appeared over the weekend that included the text “Bozkurt Hackers”. Bozkurt is a Turkish town in the Aegean Region.
The video, which has since been removed, appeared on YouTube with information of the supposed foreign spies working in Qatar that are in the QNB leak. The video shows names, photographs and credit card details of the alleged spies. The video, which Gulf News was unable to independently verify, threatens to release more information from the hack this week.
