The hacktivist group Anonymous has released a video in which they declare a cyber war on ISIS following the Paris terrorist attacks. In a video posted on YouTube, a masked activist, speaking in French, announced: “Expect massive cyber attacks. War is declared. Get prepared. Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down.”
The group has been said to have been tracking ISIS activities since last year’s Charlie Hebdo attacks, but in their most recent video, they reveal that they plan on expanding their efforts.
“We will launch our biggest operation ever against you. Wait for many cyber attacks,” the group said.
#Anonymous preparing to unleash waves of cyber attacks on Islamic State after #ParisAttacks: https://t.co/irEwNGxWAH pic.twitter.com/l5i1U2FNyV
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) November 16, 2015
But what effect might the group have?
“Cyberattacks can have a tremendous impact,” cyberwarfare expert David Gewirtz told CBS News. “Of course, they can’t be used to arrest people or take terrorists off the field, but they can certainly be used to compromise structural components of terrorist operations. More to the point, they can go after both the money that terrorists have and their funding sources. Damaging the money flow can certainly have an impact on the terrorists’ operations.”
It seems that one of the targets for those operating under the Anonymous banner is disrupting ISIS’s social media recruitment efforts. ISIS is prolific online and populates popular social media channels with accounts. According to the Atlantic, a study by a Brookings Institution fellow and a data scientist discovered that in the last four months of 2014, at least 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by ISIS supporters, potentially reaching an audience of millions.
In the past day, media reports suggest that Anonymous has identified over 5,000 ISIS Twitter accounts, which are shut down by the network itself, in response to requests the activists make once they are found. Over the past year, Anonymous and other hacktivist groups have been actively notifying Twitter of suspected ISIS supporter accounts.
We report that more than 5500 Twitter account of #ISIS are now #down! #OpParis #Anonymous #ExpectUs
— #OpParis (@opparisofficial) November 17, 2015
The group can also employ ‘distributed denial of service’ cyber attacks on websites that support ISIS, which means they overload the site until it goes offline. This year, the group has dismantled some 149 ISIS-linked websites, according to a recent report in Foreign Policy.
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