What we know (and don’t know) about a rash of Middle East mystery hacks

A spate of apparent security breaches has intensified what was already a tense geopolitical situation among the Persian Gulf states. Over the last two weeks, the following incidents have allegedly occurred: a Qatari government media outlet was supposedly hacked to plant bogus quotes attributed to current Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim; damaging emails belonging to UAE’s ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al-Otaiba were leaked, and someone hacked the Twitter account of Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Khalid Al Khalifa to post propaganda associated with a Shiite militant group. Evidence is lacking for some of those claims, and the degree to which the events are related is not clear, but hackers are taking the blame, and the allegations alone have been enough to amplify tensions. All three storylines have been prominent in regional press outlets and are now being used as supporting evidence for the breakdown of relations between Qatar and the other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations. […]

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