Over the past several years, for every major ISIS threat online, we’ve seen responses from a variety of Anonymous and Anonymous-related “altruistic hacking” groups online.
Recently, ISIS was back with statements that their “subscriber lists were unhackable.”
Enter the online Muslim hacking collective “Di5s3nSiOn” (“Dissention”) — who hacked and posted the “secure email list” of ISIS’ AMAQ news agency. This was confirmed by The Independent (UK) recently.
Di5s3nSiOn’s posts online also indicate goals of releasing people suffering under violent ISIS rule, as well as a targeted campaign against ISIS slated for Friday, Nov. 17. Hacktivist operations such as this not only underscore Muslim exhaustion with ISIS cult violence and increased online counter-insurgency, but the fact that ISIS’s online army, much like its physical army, is weakening.
While this weakness is an opportunity for our online and cyberdefense forces to leverage Di5s3nSiOn’s data dump for targeting — it’s important to note that on-the-ground defeats stand to raise the risk of ISIS-syndicated attacks, the further we penetrate their last stronghold of Deir Ezzor.
Oz Sultan is a leading Big Data and counterterrorism expert who focuses on anti-recruiting and ISIS counterterror (CT) research within social media. He also advises a number of Fortune 1000 companies and is Adjunct Faculty at City University of New York (CUNY) Baruch. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.