Pierluigi Paganini March 30, 2015

The New York Times reported that a group of hackers is interfering with the activities made through social media by members of the ISIS group.

According to The New York Times hackers are targeting accounts used by ISIS members for propaganda and recruit new sympathizers. A group of hackers using the pseudonyms of TouchMyTweets, The Doctor and IS Hunting are targeting suspected ISIS accounts blacklisting them, the hackers have also launched a call to arms for other hackers to report and interfere with any other accounts used by the IS members.

Security experts linked the hackers to the popular collective Anonymous despite there is no proof of the relationship between the hacktivist group and the lone hackers. In the last months Anonymous has declared war to the ISIS and its militant, the conflict was exacerbated following the dramatic attack against Charlie Hebdo.

In February, Anonymous announced the OpISIS and launched a series of attacks against the jihadist websites supporting the ISIS and its propaganda on the Web. As promised, the popular  group shouted revenge in the aftermath of the vicious against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. After the attack, Anonymous launched the #OpCharlieHebdo against the member of ISIS on the web, the popular hacking team cry out for vengeance for the assault on the Charlie Hebdo, convinced that what happened is not tolerable.

Anonymous ha also posted the manifest of the Op Charlie Hebdo on Pastebin, below the translation of an excerpt from the message:

The journalists confirmed the presence of women hackers, so called “Anonymisses”, which are directly involved in the crusade against the ISIS. Basically, the hackers operate to identify, de-anonymized IS accounts and take over them.

In the past months the ISIS members have made large use of principal social media for their propaganda, the terrorists demonstrated significant capabilities in managing media campaign and on the Internet is also circulating a manual for the members that include precious suggestions to avoid online surveillance. The New York Times confirmed that the Islamic State managed some 70,000 to 90,000 Twitter accounts for its propaganda.

The manual is titled “How to Tweet Safely Without Giving out Your Location to NSA” Manual and explains how to avoid surveillance of the Intelligence agencies, the document highlights how to prevent exposing location and/or key data using the popular social network Twitter.

The researchers J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan revealed that nearly some 18,000 pro-IS Twitter accounts have been suspended by the company.

The researchers explained that there are various indicators that could help the identification of ISIS accounts, for example the origin country, the language (75% ISIS account use Arabic, only 20 percent English) used by members in conjunction with beheadings images.

The majority of accounts used by ISIS members was traced to Saudi Arabia, followed by Syria, Iraq and the United States.

Stay tuned for further information …

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  ISIS,  hackers)