More evidence has emerged linking hackers who targeted our sister newspaper Gulf Daily News (GDN) with Iran.

The GDN reported last week that a group calling itself the Delta Hacking Team had failed to hack into our website, but had managed to alter the homepages of four other magazines owned by our parent group Al Hilal on April 5.

It is now known that the hackers' website is hosted at www.persiangig.com, which in turn is registered with an Iranian Internet registration service.

'They are using an Iranian website registered with Iran's registration service,' said Trade Arabia webmaster Francis Pangilinan, who has been investigating the hacking since last week.

'Delta Hacking Team used the free web hosting service on the Persiangig site to save and upload their homepage to hacked sites.'

The Persiangig site, like most websites in the world, uses a US server located in Virginia.

'Most websites use US servers as they tend to be faster and have better infrastructure than anywhere else in the world,' said Pangilinan.

Although the group was unable to tamper with the GDN's website, it did plant files on one of our servers that have since been removed.

They were simply files designed to alter webpages that are typically used in the creation of websites.

The group did succeed in changing the homepages of four other publications, including Gulf Construction and Oil and Gas - replacing them with a map of the region and labelling it as the Persian Gulf.

Tougher security has now been introduced across the company's websites to prevent similar attacks in future, added Pangilinan.-TradeArabia News Service