A group of Anonymous-affiliated hackers claims to have gained access to the servers in charge of filtering Internet traffic in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This particular breach appears to be part of Operation GodFather.



“Hello citizens of the world. Here comes another leak. This time our target was UAE and its oppressive Netfilers,” the hacktivists said.

“As many of you might already know UAE's internet is fully run and monitored by government run ISP's. We decided to ‘take a look’ ;) we managed to get into the Netfilter server and are leaking this data we extracted from their DB.”

The data leak comprises website URLs filtered by the UAE’s Internet service providers and a list of blockades set in place with the use of wildcards.

According to the hackers, they have identified a number of domain categories that are currently being blocked.

These include websites that host adult content, VPN providers and any other site that could help users bypass censorship mechanisms, social media networks and dating sites, and ones that promote other religious views than Islam.

The most “shocking” discovery, as described by the hackers, is the fact that many websites that offer Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services are also on the list.

“A large part of UAE's population is made of migrant workers and the telecom industry made a lot of profit by overcharging them for international phone calls. But with the raise of VOIP and internet communication they were afraid that this would take away their profits and thus went ahead to block VOIP,” they explained.

“Is this something a country can be allowed to do? Force people to cough up more money when they are already paid the lowest wages possible?”