Muslim Brotherhood's English website suffers multiple DDoS attacks and data leaks

The official English website of Society of the Muslim Brothers or Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Islamist organisation primarily prevalent in Egypt, has reportedly suffered multiple DDoS attacks forcing the website to go offline. The attackers also claim to have bypassed the site's security to steal crucial data and leak it online for public access.

DDoS, short for Distributed Denial of Service, is a type of cyberattack where multiple compromised systems infected with a Trojan are used to target a single system causing the attack. The website apparently suffered the attack despite using CloudFlare DDoS protection service.

At 6am BST when we tried to access the website an Error 522 showed up. However, when we checked again at the time of publishing, the site was up.

An Error 522 occurs when CloudFlare cannot make a TCP (transmission control protocol) connection to the origin server. This generally happens when the site suffers DDoS attacks and CloudFlare is unable to take the load and is not able to send the HTTP request to the origin.

The alleged hacking group behind the attacks identify themselves as SkyNetCentral who also claim to have additionally attacked the official website of Muslim Brotherhood's affiliate party Freedom and Justice Party. The data they claimed to have unearthed from the Muslim brotherhood's main servers has been put up by them on Wikisend measuring 5.2MB is size.

The data dump contains information like IP addresses, email conversation, comments and names and IP addresses of commenters. However, no internal or sensitive data seems to have surfaced so far. Although the motive of the attack is not yet known, the hacking group seems to have breached several similar sites before like the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR.