The Ministry of Interior denied Friday evening reports that its website had been taken offline by hackers, despite the claims of a group who say they are responsible for numerous downed governmental sites.
The ministry’s media centre stated that they reject the reports that had spread on news and social media, and that the reason for the short disruption of the website was due to “regular maintenance”.
Earlier on Friday, a group calling itself “Anonymous Rabaa Square” posted via its Facebook page a claim of responsibility for the police’s official website going offline, along with a screenshot of the page failing to load.
The group’s Facebook page stated: “Glory to the martyrs of prisons. We are the hackers of the Egyptian revolution and will have no mercy and not forget… We will have no mercy on those who attack Islam.”
The page of the group later posts a screenshot that claims to show the group also took down the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during Friday evening. The called it a second success “in response to the killing of innocents in Egyptian prisons”. However, the website appeared to be functional at the time of publishing.
The group’s Facebook page also claims the group has taken offline various Jordanian governmental websites for increasing relations with Israel.
On 14 August, the second anniversary of the mass killings of pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters at Rabaa Al-Adaweya and Al-Nahda squares, Turkish hackers attacked the website of the Cairo International Airport.
“In revenge for the blood of the martyrs killed by the military gang and [President Abdel Fattah] Al-Sisi following the coup, you will drown in the blood of the protesters you killed,” the CIA website read, alongside the four-finger R4BIA symbol.
In 2011, the international Anonymous hacker group said it had frozen numerous government websites during the first days of the January uprising, bringing down the sites of the Ministry of Information and former president Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.
It is not believed that Anonymous Rabaa Square holds any relation to the prominent international Anonymous.
