Hacker group Anonymous announced yesterday it was waging war on ISIS in retaliation for the Paris terror attacks, and it looks like their first blow was a pretty big one.
From RT:
Hacktivist group Anonymous has reported that more than 5,500 Twitter accounts belonging to Islamic State have been taken down. It comes after the collective declared a “total war” on the militant group following the Paris attacks.
Tweeting from its #OpParis account, Anonymous stated: “We report that more than 5500 Twitter account (sic) of #ISIS are now #down! #OpParis #Anonymous #ExpectUS.”
“Our capability to take down ISIS is a direct result of our collective’s sophisticated hackers, data miners, and spies that we have all around the world. We have people very, very close to ISIS on the ground, which makes gathering intel about ISIS and related activities very easy for us,” Alex Poucher, a spokesman for Anonymous, told RT.
He added that the collective has built tools that “might be better than any world government’s tools to combat ISIS online.”
“They picked a fight with Anonymous when they attacked Paris, and now they should expect us,” he said, adding that the collective “will not sit by and watch these terror attacks unfold around the world.”
ISIS has been super effective at using social media — especially Twitter — to recruit folks for their sick, twisted cause, targeting young people who feel alienated or abandoned and are searching for a place to belong.
Taking out these radicals is going to take a strategy that not only includes boots on the ground, but also provisions for cyber warfare to knock out their capabilities to recruit new Jihadis online.
In fact, shutting down their social media presence is critical to successfully dismantling the group as it removes a tool of communication that is no doubt used to help coordinate attacks just as much as it’s used for brainwashing the weak minded.
Unfortunately, President Obama has made it pretty clear he isn’t going to do much to fight against ISIS or fulfill his duty to defend our country from outside threats, which is exactly why groups like Anonymous do these sort of things, because our government isn’t doing its job.
