No cinema, no pubs, no clubs, and not even a shared classroom. So it should be no real surprise that hacking has found its nirvana in a country where discussion and debate is not encouraged and socializing is still frowned upon.

Recent events, including the defacing of ministerial Web sites, have drawn attention to the country’s community of hackers. In September, they vandalized the Web sites of the Ministry of Labor and the Saudi National Society for Human Rights. (Visitors to the Labor ministry’s home page were greeted by a message in Saudi dialect that read: “We are fed up with unemployment. Maybe you will hear this time.”)

Unable to discuss their grievances in public or through the media, Saudi youth are turning to online forums and discussion groups to talk about issues such as unemployment and frustration with the slow pace of reform. A founder of one such site, Hawaa, saw visitor numbers soar recently as young Saudis have turned to the Internet. “Our worth has gone through the roof as we’ve seen more people using chat room. We’re now in the top three Web sites in the Kingdom, alongside Google and Microsoft,” says Hani al-Ghofaily.

Officially, unemployment stands at 11.2 percent, though private estimates put the number far higher. Saudis between the ages of 20 and 24 account for 44 percent of the country’s jobless population. While the attack on the Ministry of Labor may have been the most high-profile case yet, hackers such as Archangel, S4udi-S3curity-T3rror and DarKMaSTer have also targeted multinationals such as Microsoft. Last year, Saudi hackers who defaced a page on Microsoft’s UK Web site went so far as to record the techniques they used in an online video.

Educational institutions haven’t escaped the attention of young Saudis either. Almost two years ago, one potential student who was declined admission to study computer science at Riyadh’s King Saud University got angry, went home, fired up his computer, and shut down the university’s online discussion forum. The prospective student said he was upset by an official at the admissions department who insulted his high school coursework and told him to come back when he had better grades. After hacking into the Web site, the university’s webmaster urged the admissions department to admit the tech-savvy student.

Changing the rules. While there seems to be a lack of statistics on the sheer extent of Internet crime in Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom’s authorities passed legislation to tackle cybercrime last year. The Act against cybercriminals includes punishments for individuals or groups who try to “gain unauthorized access to a Web site, changing its look or design, shutting it down, or sabotaging, modifying or stealing the address of that Web site.”

Riyadh says there are few Saudi hackers based in the country.  Fahd al-Abboud, a member of the Shoura Council’s Tele-communications and IT Committee, told the press when the new law was an-nounced that there are “not that many [cybercriminals]. Cybercrime has not become a phenomenon in the Kingdom.”

The government’s legislation seems to be aimed at curbing religious extremism rather than countering hacking activities. The legislation’s penalties include a maximum 10-year jail term and can incur a fine of up to five million Saudi Riyals ($1.3 million) against anyone who builds or publishes a Web site for a terrorist group “to facilitate communicating their ideas or making explosives.”

The challenge many online users in the kingdom face is circumventing the government’s extensive Web filtering and firewall systems. The Saudi government blocks not only adult content, but also a range of relatively benign information about religion, health, education, humor and entertainment. According to some estimates, there are more than 400,000 Web sites blocked to Saudi Internet users.

One Saudi-based surfer says she began hacking out of curiosity. “I just wanted to read more and understand what was going on outside of the region,” explains the hacker, known as Doctor Holiday. “Eventually [I] got to a point where I was hacking into servers and downloading files. However, I never did anything malicious.”

One of the few studies to address cybercrime randomly surveyed 10,000 Saudi-based Internet users. More than 500 were found to have attempted to hack government Web sites. Of those, two-thirds were Saudi nationals. The study, by Mohammed Alminshawi of the Naif Arab Academy for Security Sciences, also found that 3.5 percent of Saudi hackers and 1.8 percent of foreign hackers have tried to break into commercial Web sites.

Other reports paint a more alarming picture, claiming that 14.2 percent of Saudi Internet users hack into Saudi Web sites, as opposed to 8.9 percent of foreign users. The nation’s financial system has also been affected. While Dubai gained attention recently for a widely reported hack on the country’s ATM network, one Saudi hacker told Phrack magazine that credit card numbers for a bank operating in Saudi Arabia were listed on a German chat-styled Web page used by hackers worldwide.

The rise of hacking hasn’t gone unnoticed by businesses, particularly those involved in providing Internet-based services. Chat rooms in Saudi report that Internet service providers (ISPs) hire professional hackers to escape proxy servers in order to connect to banned Web sites and allow them anonymous Web access.

A team of Saudi hackers was the first to crack the security on the iPhone. Yusuf Omar, a network consultant in Jeddah in his 30s, and his team led efforts to provide Arabic-language support for iPhone users last year. But unlike Apple, Yusuf declined to use the term hacker to denote himself. “We are not hackers, we are developers,” Omar said, adding that his project also involves allowing the iPhone to use Unicode and Windows’ own language support for Arabic script.

Harsh virtual reality.  And yet, the main drive for many young hackers is religious extremism. According to many experts, so-called information warfare is gaining a foothold in the Kingdom. The former senior advisor on IT and security to the Saudi Interior Ministry, Abdulrahman

al-Shenaifi, was instrumental in setting up the Kingdom’s first cybercrime unit to tackle criminals online. He warns that online threats are just as serious as those in the real world.

“We have to coordinate across borders, because online is the new theater of war,” al-Shenaifi says. “A lot of people can see this. For those who believe that cybercrime is only happening in Europe or the US, they are deluding themselves. They should see reality as it is - once you connect, you are not alone, whether you tap in, in England, in America, in the Middle East, anywhere.”

The fear is that hacking may evolve beyond a “fun” hobby, that groups that work to shutdown anti-Islamic Web sites in order to prevent those views from appearing on the Web may turn on other targets. Sunni and Shi’a rival hackers slugged it out recently in an attempt to outdo one another.

There is also the mythical fear that hackers could infiltrate systems to shut down power grids, disrupt financial transactions and close down telephone systems. As yet, this has not happened, but al-Shenaifi believes we should be ready regardless. “You cannot assess security as ever being 100 percent,” he adds. “What security does mean is putting up barriers, just like a country having an army, an air force – just like that. Today’s world is different.”      

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