Al Mayadeen hacked after reflecting truth of Iran riots: Director

A number of social media pages of the outlet were hacked on Thursday night and published a fake news piece about an explosion at Beirut airport. The network immediately dismissed the fake story and announced that its accounts had come under a cyber-attack.

According to Halawi, the platforms were successfully restored and resumed work within a few minutes.

She said the outlet has designated a special section for covering the violent riots in Iran which are aimed at undermining the security of the Islamic Republic.

“Al Mayadeen reporting the truth regarding what is going on in Iran infuriated several parties,” she said on Thursday.

The social platforms, she said, were hacked via an account that had access to the network but the situation came under control shortly after the attack.

Describing the attack as “complicated and thoroughly thought out,” Halawi said hackers had been preparing the attack for a long time.

Attackers in a post claimed to be a Daesh cell in the Ain Al-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, but Halawi dismissed the claim, saying, “We have information proving it is much more serious than that.”

“We were able to find the IP addresses of the parties that hacked Al Mayadeen’s social media pages,” she said.

According to the director, there have been several cyber-attack attempts against the channel’s platforms before.

The attack came amid ongoing Western support for riots in Iran which erupted in mid-September after the death of young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who fainted at a police station in Tehran and was pronounced dead three days later in a hospital.

The violent riots have claimed the lives of dozens of people and members of security forces, while also allowing terrorist groups to carry out strikes in the country.

On November 16, at least seven people were killed when terrorists opened fire at people and security forces at a crowded market in Izeh in the southwestern province of Khuzestan around sunset. Meanwhile, three people were killed and eight members of security forces injured during riots in Semirom in the central Iranian province of Isfahan.