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Earlier today, popular local news site, Doha News had an attempted breach of their website and social accounts by hackers.

Their website dohanews.co was experiencing issues in terms of the accounts of some of its users. Certain pages and posts are still not accessible, displaying an error message once you click on a link.

Site and social media takeover

The reason behind the attack is currently unknown, as well as the identity of the hackers.

Shabina Khatri, executive editor and co-founder of Doha News, said she discovered that someone had logged onto their site and Twitter account early this morning.

“We don’t know who the attackers were. They had control of our Twitter account for about 20 minutes, and deleted a bunch of our followers. They took down the site temporarily as well,” Khatri said.

However, both the site and Twitter account have been restored, and they are currently working on fixing other issues on their site. Khatri shared that users have nothing to worry about and that everything will be back to normal soon.

Unprecedented

“Clearly the attackers have something against Doha News,” Khatri added. This is the first time something like this has happened to Doha News. The IP address of the hackers was scattered, so they were able to maintain anonymity.

Earlier this week, many popular sites based on the United States east coast were also targets of a cyber attack. The identity of who attacked Dyn, an Internet company that hosts a variety of widely used platforms, is still unknown. Sites such as Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Soundcloud, and Spotify were all down worldwide.

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