Pierluigi Paganini
September 24, 2016
Months ago, I reported you the story of Ardit Ferizi, aka Th3Dir3ctorY, who is the hacker that supported the ISIS organization by handing over data for 1,351 US government and military personnel.
Ferizi is the first man charged with cyber terrorism that was extradited to the US early this year.
He was charged with hacking crimes and providing support to a terrorist organization. The 20-year-old man was 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 2015 and transferred to the US to face trial.
Now Ardit Ferizi has been sentenced to 20 years in a U.S. prison. 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 2015, according to the US authorities.
The details of the Ferizi’s case are described in the court filings [PDF].
Leaked 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, aka Th3Dir3ctorY, from Kosovo was sentenced in federal court in Alexandria, for “providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and accessing a protected computer without authorization and obtaining information in order to provide material support to ISIL,” the Department of Justice announced on Friday.
The 21-year-old ISIS-linked hacker obtained the data by hacking into the US web hosting company’s servers on June 13, 2015.
The US authorities suspected that Ferizi is a member of a Kosovan hacking team known as KHS, he used the pseudonym of “Th3Dir3ctorY”. The KHS breached a database of a US retailer was able to identify the records belonging to military and government personnel.
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.
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).
Ferizi was pleaded guilty on June 15, 2016, the faced a sentence of up to 35 years in prison, but the sentence was reduced to a maximum of 25 years in jail after agreeing to plead guilty.
However, the Ferizi’s defense lawyers sustained that his client had no real intention of put militaries in danger, then he asked for a six-year sentence.
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(Security Affairs – Ardit Ferizi, ISIS Kill list)
