Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Hacking ISIS: The War To Kill The Cyber Jihad


Joshua Sinai at the Washington Times offers a review of  Hacking ISIS.

Terrorists and their extremist adherents are adept at utilizing the internet, particularly social media platforms, which have become widely accessible globally, and in multiple languages.

These cyberspace platforms are used to spread their extremist ideologies, raise funding, communicate with one another, penetrate across borders into foreign countries that would not permit them to enter physically at their border crossings, and gain new recruits whose only initial contact with them may be via their personal computers.

For counterterrorism agencies, while the primary activity remains to militarily defeat terrorist groups and their operatives in “physical space,” these online terrorist-related social media platforms are an important secondary arena to use cyberwarfare tools to counter the terrorist organizations and their activist supporters who manage and operate such sites, including countering the extremist propaganda they propagate.

The veteran al Qaeda (and its regional affiliates) terrorist group and the relative newcomer Islamic State (known as ISIS) — which has become the latest “superstar” of Salafi jihadi terrorism (although it is also nowadays in sharp retreat as a result of the American-led military coalition campaign against it in Iraq and Syria) are the leading exploiters and beneficiaries of the Internet’s dissemination capabilities.

Since it is fairly straightforward to employ military forces — and specially trained counterterrorism forces — to defeat such terrorist groups, what are effective countermeasures against them in cyberspace, where specialized cyberwarfare tools must be used against them? In answering this question, Malcolm Nance and Chris Sampson’s “Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad” is an important, well-researched and detailed reference resource about how al Qaeda, and now, more prominently, ISIS, operate in cyberspace and the measures required to counter and defeat what the authors term as “cyber jihad.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

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