A fresh surge in cyberattacks is escalating tensions between Moroccan and Algerian hacking collectives. Over the weekend, an Algerian group took credit for a major assault on numerous Moroccan governmental sites, causing disruptions across multiple online services.
The cyber conflict between Moroccan and Algerian hacking groups escalated into a fresh stage starting Tuesday, characterized by successive waves of assaults and retaliations aimed at organizations across both countries’ borders. On Saturday, the Algerian collective known as DDOS54 asserted their involvement in carrying out a major distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault against multiple governmental sites in Morocco.
In a post made to their Telegram channel, DDOS54 declared they had initiated a “significant operation” targeting Morocco’s digital framework—an assertive reaction, as stated, to purported cyber attacks conducted by Moroccan hacking groups. According to the organization, they had interfered with access to multiple governmental websites such as the platform managed by the Ministry of Agriculture (unavailable from late Saturday through Sunday), the portal for the Ministry of Relations with Parliament (which has since been brought back online), and Tax.gov.ma, where visitors encountered a notification indicating maintenance activities were underway.
In contrast to earlier incidents, no data breaches have been reported yet. Nonetheless, DDOS54 stated that their 15-day operation is intended to “disable Moroccan governmental digital operations,” with successive assaults aimed at highlighting what they refer to as a pivotal moment in the “annals of this cyber dispute.”
A Cycle of Escalation Beginning on Tuesday
The most recent surge started on Tuesday when an Algerian group called JabaRoot DZ stated they had breached Morocco’s National Social Security Fund (CNSS) and released documents purportedly holding salary details for 2 million people across 500,000 enterprises.
As a result, Moroccan hacking collectives initiated a string of counterattacks targeting Algerian organizations. The entities affected included the MGTT’s official site and the Algerian Ministry of Labour, with both facing temporary disruptions.
The biggest retaliation emerged from another group based in Morocco, which published a massive cache of 34GB worth of classified information purportedly taken from Algeria’s Ministry of Pharmaceutical Industry. This leaked material encompassed private papers and internal correspondences.
Telegram: A Digital Battlefield
Telegram has emerged as the main arena for these hacker groups—used not only to claim responsibility and publish stolen data but also to issue threats and coordinate future operations. The message posted Saturday by DDOS54 was both aggressive and clear: «The mission is clear, and the objective is defined: to paralyze the Moroccan government’s digital systems and disable all its electronic services».
Once an occasional series of cyber events, what we see now is a more organized and persistent digital confrontation between Moroccan and Algerian hacking collectives. Although there’s no concrete proof tying these entities directly to their respective governments, the choice of targets and the strategic timing of assaults imply underlying political tensions.
Already locked in a tense diplomatic standoff, Morocco and Algeria are now seeing their rivalry spill into the digital realm—posing growing risks to public data security, the continuity of essential services, and citizen trust.
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