Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood, also known as the Society of the Muslim Brothers or Ikhwan, is a Sunni Islamist organization headquartered in Egypt. It originated in Egypt and has developed a presence in various countries through a network of affiliates and sympathizers. The group engages in social services, religious preaching, and political activism, often operating through affiliated political parties and civil society organizations. Its activities include running charities, schools, and clinics, as well as participating in electoral politics where permitted. The organization maintains a hierarchical structure with a general guide and a shura council overseeing its operations. It has been both praised for its social outreach and criticized or banned by several governments for its political ambitions. The Brotherhood's ideology emphasizes the implementation of Islamic law in public and private life while advocating for social justice and anti-colonial sentiments. Over the decades, it has inspired numerous Islamist movements across the Middle East and beyond. Despite facing repression in some states, it continues to function clandestinely or legally depending on the national context.

In June 2016, the Muslim Brotherhood's official website and the website of its affiliated political party were targeted by a distributed denial-of-service attack carried out by a hacker using the moniker SkyNetCentral. The attack overwhelmed the sites' protective measures, rendering both platforms inaccessible to users for a period of time. During the incident, SkyNetCentral also managed to compromise parts of the organization's database, extracting non‑sensitive information such as commenters' IP addresses, email exchanges, and names. The hacker publicly justified the action by equating the Muslim Brotherhood with extremist groups and citing ideological opposition as the motive. No highly sensitive or classified data was reported to have been accessed in the breach. The event highlighted the vulnerability of the group's online infrastructure to politically motivated cyber attacks. Following the attack, the Brotherhood reportedly worked to restore its websites and improve its security posture. The incident was covered by cybersecurity news outlets, which noted the attacker's stated rationale and the limited scope of the data leak. This episode remains one of the documented cyber incidents involving the organization's digital assets.