Saudi University Buys Twitter Account (800,000 US Dollars?)

صوت باسل الرشيدي
صاحب حساب صحيح البخاري ومسلم #نشرة_التاسعة pic.twitter.com/rLBMVoOlSG

— MBC أخبار (@MBC24News) September 14, 2017

Last September, the Saudi-funded TV channel MBC aired a phone interview with Bassel Al Rashedy, the owner of a popular Islamic Twitter account (1.3 Million followers), who said Qatar offered him 3 Million Saudi Riyals (800,000 US Dollars) to buy his account. The owner, who is Kuwaiti, said he had rejected the offer.

Few days ago, video shows meeting between the account owner and Dr. Suleiman Aba Al-khail, the president of Saudi university, an ex-minister, and who serves also as a member of the Senior Clerks' Committee, the highest religious body in Saudi Arabia.


The president of the university thanked Bassel saying we will cooperate with him, and emphasizing on university's role to spread word of mouth of spreading the message of Islam.


After that, the account published a tweet thanking the previous account administrator, Bassel, and announcing a new administrator who will keep publishing hadiths in addition to defending Saudi Arabia's government, and people.

دفع عضو "هيئة كبار العلماء" سليمان أبا الخيل مبلغا قدره 1.300.000 ريال لقاء شراء حساب باسل الرشيدي على تويتر صاحب الاسم "صحيح البخاري ومسلم"

— العهد الجديد (@Ahdjadid) October 16, 2017

The above tweet comes from a Twitter account that claims unveiling Saudi and Gulf top secrets from royal courts and decision making rooms. It says the president of the university paid 1.3M Saudi Riyals (346,700 US dollars) to acquire the Twitter account from its Kuwaiti owner.

Since June 5th, political tension escalated between Qatar and its neighbor country the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Twitter is the most popular social media platform in the region where official ministers, and even royal family princes were posting, escalating, and acting as PR machines defending their countries' point of view.



New Egypt Consulting is a digital marketing & social media agency based in Cairo since 2011.
Company Profile: http://bit.ly/2lO7sNS
Email: info@newegyptconsulting.com
Website: http://newegyptconsulting.com

Is Russia Hacking Google Servers?

Is Russia hacking Google servers?
It is strange that Blogger (Google product) stats are showing excessive traffic from Russia last September

We host this blog on Blogger, which is a Google product hosted on Google servers.
The story started with our Blogger stats dashboard shows a excessive traffic to it from Russia & Ukraine!


This was strange for us for five reasons: we do not have Russian content, our services and campaigns are not targeting Russia, we do not work with Russian clients, they appear for a day or two before disappearing, and Google Analytics report doesn't show Russia or Ukraine!


For those who are not aware, Google Analytics are different than Blogger stats dashboard as the latter collects data from all the traffic coming and going from your blog, which does include human traffic, but also includes bots and spam.


The above screen shot shows traffic during September 21st from Russia. Below screen shot for our blog clearly shows normal traffic coming from USA and Egypt (which is logic) while only 3 pageviews were coming from Russia (unlike excessive traffic from there 2 days ago)!

As a pattern of strange behavior, we've noticed excessive traffic to our website from Ukraine. Referring sites list shows completely Russian websites as per below two screen shots:

With the news on the US election and the debate on the American President Donald Trump winning it due to Russian cyber interference. Can this post help in tracing the root causes for possible Russian activities targeting Google servers where our blog is hosted?



New Egypt Consulting is a digital marketing & social media agency based in Cairo since 2011.
Company Profile: http://bit.ly/2lO7sNS
Email: info@newegyptconsulting.com
Website: http://newegyptconsulting.com

Digital Egypt: ITIDA or TIEC Strategy Roadmap

Looking for digital Egypt? Below is just a suggested strategy roadmap for Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) or Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) from New Egypt Consulting as one of the industry stakeholders given that digital marketing industry represents 5% of jobs in Egypt - yes :)


1- Objective: Promoting & Social Media Courses & Individual IT Entrepreneurs  (Investment Activity):

• Strategy #1: Prioritizing specialized tracks in ITI for video marketing, social media, SEO, and digital advertising (As separate independent tracks). We are in the market since 2011, and qualified social media marketers are very rare.

• Strategy #2: Educating web developers, graphic designers, social media marketers, software engineers on presenting their skills and experiences in their CVs, LinkedIn profiles, etc. Simply, if someone is unable to present himself to employers, s/he will be unable to present any idea or business to an investor
• Stakeholders: ITI, academia, training providers, HR trainers, recruitment companies, universities, etc.
• Program: Weekly sessions on YouTube, Soundcloud (less mobile data), video conferencing aired to universities' campuses - all to be broadcasted from TIEC or ITIDA to save investment costs and unify the message.

2- Objective: Increasing Exports by IT Entrepreneurs (Profitable Activity):

• Strategy: Partnership with Upwork to have a white-labeled portal under TIEC or ITIDA management and control so all Egyptian web developers, graphic designers, social media marketers, and software engineers (in addition to Egyptian companies) can deliver work to companies and clients from around the world, where TIEC/ITIDA and Upwork can share 20% commission of revenues this is already applied on the platform now.
• Stakeholders: universities, syndicate of engineers, chambers of commerce, banks, Egyptian embassies, etc.
• Program: Enrollment application supervised by TIEC or ITIDA to ensure only qualified talent pool are eligible to join the platform on Tiec.gov.eg(or itida.gov.eg)/HireEgyptian
• Budget: To be covered within 2 years by commission revenues.

New Egypt Consulting is a digital marketing & social media agency based in Cairo since 2011.
Email: info@newegyptconsulting.com