Hacker Group “Anonymous” Wages Cyber War Against Paris Attackers With “Op ISIS”

Anonymous, the group of hackers known for their abilities for breaking into almost any online entity, has announced to wage a cyber war on the Islamic State, also known as Daesh or the ISIS for short, in retaliation for the recent terrorist attacks on the city of Paris.

On the evening of November 13th, the city of Paris was the victim of a series of of coordinated terrorist attacks, leaving 129 dead and another 352 critically injured. The ISIS claimed responsibility for this attack, calling it a payback for the military interference by France in the war-torn Syria. Soon after, Anonymous, a loosely associated yet extremely powerful international network of activist and hacktivist entities, vowed to wage a cyber war against ISIS.

In a chilling video, a man with in a Guy Fawkes mask, a symbol synonymous with the hacking community, announced Anonymous’ plans to attack the Islamic State.

“These attacks that cannot be left unpunished,” He says, “That’s why Anonymous worldwide will track you.”

ISIS is known to have a pretty big online presence, a huge factor in the way their recruitment and radicalization of other people. Thousands of Twitter accounts are known to be operated by members of this terrorist organization and this is what Anonymous is aiming to target.

In barely a few days since the video has hit the web, the results of this operation, “Op Isis”, are starting to appear. This time, the hacker group has mainly focussed on reporting the ISIS accounts and are now claiming that nearly 5,500 of their Twitter accounts are reportedly down. Apart from that, a popular messaging-service Telegram also reports that it shut down 78 ISIS-related channels, this week alone. They even went as far as to publishing a full on how-to guide for the normal users to help in their online crusade against the ISIS.

Although ISIS’s online presence is too big to be tarnished easily, Anonymous is known for its resilience in toppling even the toughest of opponents. Being a decentralized virtual community, anyone can join in if they side with the community’s main causes and this strategy has worked really great for them in the past. Despite government raids and numerous arrests, the organization still continues to function as the internet’s dark horse. Perhaps it is this power of the hacking group, that has even got the ISIS worried.

A new message from the ISIS, recovered by the “The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence”, has revealed some instructions from the ISIS to members of the organization to take some necessary online security measures, in an effort to reduce the risk of falling in for common hacking techniques.

Although Anonymous is doing it as a retaliation for the Paris attacks and they are proving to be quite successful in limiting the online options for the ISIS, this might not be the best way to do it. The online accounts of these terrorist groups are a way for intelligence and security agencies to track them down and this operation may result in the Islamic State resorting to much complicated, yet much more secure, solutions that would prove to be too hard for intelligence agencies to crack.

Source – CNBC