Actvists 'reveal' 24,000 URLs blocked in UAE

A group of internet activists has published 24,000 URLs and keywords they say are censored by Internet providers in the UAE, daily newspaper The National reported on Sunday.

The computer-hacking group Anonymous says most of the sites featured adult content or insulted Islam, while others provided online telephone services that offered free or cheap phone calls, the report added.

"UAE's internet is fully run and monitored by government-run ISPs," the group said. "We managed to get into the Netfilter server and are leaking this data we extracted from their [database]."

The group of ‘hacktivists’ has previously targeted anti-software piracy organisations and critics of WikiLeaks, and has wreaked havoc on the networks and websites of credit-card companies, banks and multinational companies, The National explained.

The article did not publish any of the URLs or keywords claimed to have been hacked and it said the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), which regulates the country’s two telecoms providers Du and Etisalat, did not confirm or deny if the list was real.

However, a computer forensics investigator in Dubai said that while the group should be ‘taken seriously’, the fact that they had managed to access the list did not necessarily mean the UAE’s central proxy had been compromised, the report added. 

"Just because they have been able to identify which websites are blocked, this isn't any amazing achievement," the unnamed investigator was quoted as saying.