ISIS – The first man charged of cyber terrorism has been extradited to the US

Malaysia extradited a hacker charged by DoJ with stealing the personal data of US members and passing it to the ISIS.

A former computer science student accused of supporting the ISIL terrorist group has arrived in the US to face charges.

The former computer science student Ardit Ferizi is charged with hacking crimes and providing support to a terrorist organization. The 20-year-old man is accused of supporting the ISIS terrorist organization, he was the subject of extradition from the Malaysian government, where he lived. The man of Kosovar origin was studying computer science in Malaysia.

He  was arrested in Malaysia in September and now he was transferred to the US to face trial. He is being tried in the US Eastern District Court in Virginia

If the accusation from the US Department of Justice is confirmed he risks 35 years of imprisonment.

According to the US investigators, he provided the data to the popular IS militant Junaid Hussain, which disclosed it on the web. The collaboration between the IS hackers Hussain and Ferizi started in April according to the US authorities.

Data included names, e-mail addresses, passwords, locations and phone numbers of 1,351 U.S. military and other government personnel.

The stolen data included names, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and passwords.

“Ardit Ferizi is a terrorist hacker who provided material support” said the Assistant Attorney General John Carlin. “This case is a first of its kind and, with these charges, we seek to hold Ferizi accountable for his theft of this information and his role in ISIL’s targeting of U.S. government employees,” Carlin said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

He passed the precious information to members of the ISIS to hit personnel of the US Government.

“Specifically, the [data] stolen by Ferizi was knowingly provided to ISIL to be used by ISIL members and supporters to conduct terrorist attacks against the US government employees whose names and addresses were published,” the DOJ charges in its complaint.

The US authorities suspect that Ferizi is a member of a Kosovan hacking team known as KHS, he used the pseudonymous of “Th3Dir3ctorY”. The KHS breached a database of a US retailer was able to identify the records belonging to military and government personnel.

I wrote about Ferizi in October 2015, when the man was arrested by Malaysian authorities because for the first time ever the US Justice Department has charged a suspect for terrorism and hacking (cyber terrorism).

The Kosova Hacker’s Security (KHS) hit numerous organizations across the world, including Serbian Government websites, Israeli websites under the #OpIsrael campaign, The Interpol, IBM Research, Hotmail, US National Weather Service Website and numerous targets in Ukraine.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – cyber terrorism,  ISIS)