{"id":40995,"date":"2019-09-28T10:22:40","date_gmt":"2019-09-28T10:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=40995"},"modified":"2019-09-28T10:22:40","modified_gmt":"2019-09-28T10:22:40","slug":"hackers-break-into-lebanese-ministry-of-finance-website","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=40995","title":{"rendered":"Hackers break into Lebanese Ministry of Finance website"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nBEIRUT: A hacker group claimed it had hacked the Lebanese Ministry of Finance\u2019s website for about an hour on Friday afternoon. The Anonymous\u2014LEB group, which said it had carried out the attack, addressed the Ministry through a post on its Facebook page saying:<\/p>\n

\n\u201cDear Lebanese Government:<\/p>\n

\nIf you think we forget, you are mistaken !!!<\/p>\n

\nWe have all ministry of finance data, to be leaked soon!<\/p>\n

\nWE DON\u2019T LEAVE OUR PEOPLE<\/p>\n

\n#Expect_US\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe group\u2019s Facebook page has 12,700 followers and was founded back in 2012.<\/p>\n

\nThe group posts slogans such as: \u201cThe people should not be afraid of their government. The government should be afraid of its people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe Ministry of Finance later denied its website had been hacked and said in a statement that posts on some media platforms is not true.<\/p>\n

\nIt said that the difficulty in accessing the site for about an hour was due to \u201cslowness caused by the huge number of visitors to its website.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe Ministry of Finance\u2019s website includes facilities for electronic services, information on taxes, tax calculation and legislation, annual budget documents, documented details of public debt, monthly financial performance reports, tax calendar, and the activities of the Minister of Finance.<\/p>\n

\nThe supposed cyber attack on the Ministry of Finance coincides with the Lebanese cabinet\u2019s marathon sessions to discuss the draft budget for 2020, in an attempt to further reduce the deficit. The discussions include cuts in the ministers\u2019 budgets and possibly in the salaries of the employees in the public sector.<\/p>\n

\nThe cabinet completed the approval of cuts in the budgets of 15 ministries. The Ministerial Committee for the Study of Financial, Economic and Short-term, Medium and Long-term Reforms discussed the following items: freezing wages for three years, increasing pension deductions, imposing a minimum fee on fuel and raising fees on tobacco.<\/p>\n

\nThe Lebanese parliament approved the draft budget for the year 2019 at the end of May, seven months late, and included a deficit reduction of 7.59 percent through austerity measures, which Prime Minister Saad Hariri considered at the time as \u201cthe most severe in the history of Lebanon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nAchieving a real reduction in the budget deficit of 2020 will be difficult. The interest on public debt and salaries and peripheral supplements alone account for about 79 percent of expenditure.<\/p>\n

\nMinister of Finance, Ali Hassan Khalil, said a week ago that: \u201cthe growth of the Lebanese economy is zero if not negative, putting pressure on the foreign exchange reserves of the Lebanese Central Bank. The debt rose with the interest rate increase.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BEIRUT: A hacker group claimed it had hacked the Lebanese Ministry of Finance\u2019s website for about an hour on Friday afternoon. The Anonymous\u2014LEB group, which said it had carried out the attack, addressed the Ministry through a post on its Facebook page saying: \u201cDear Lebanese Government: If you think we forget, you are mistaken !!!…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":40996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}