Members of the hacking group “Anonymous” claim to be virtually terrorizing members of the Islamic State, hacking their social media accounts, crashing their websites, and dumping their personal information online.
On Twitter, a variety of accounts affiliated with the group claim to have made progress in that campaign. One account, called “#OpParis,” claimed Tuesday to have taken down thousands of Twitter accounts belonging to ISIS. “We report that more than 5,500 Twitter account of #ISIS are now down!” the account tweeted.
Another account, called “TheBinarySec,” dumped personal information of those it claimed were affiliated with a “jihadist site” on Monday with the message, “ISIS we are coming for you.” Additionally, that user said, they crashed the server of the ISIS-affiliated website cyb3rc.com.
The attacks are the first wave promised in a French YouTube video the group posted on Sunday promising retaliation for the terrorist attacks in Paris. “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,” Alex Poucher, a spokesman for the group, told Russia Today. “We have people very, very close to ISIS on the ground, which makes gathering intel about ISIS and related activities very easy for us.” He also said the group’s tools “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,” Poucher added, saying that the group “will not sit by and watch these terror attacks unfold around the world.”
It isn’t the first time Anonymous has declared an offensive against ISIS. The group launched a similar action after 12 people were killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January. However, this week’s is shaping up to be one of the group’s largest actions to date.
In an additional tweet on Tuesday, TheBinarySec suggests that the group is just getting started, saying, “Who’s ready for the mass ddos attack on Isis sites coming up. 12/4/15 Be ready Isis. Oh and good luck.. you’ll need it.”
DDoS is the acronym for a distributed denial of service attack, which uses hundreds or thousands of computers in a network to shut down websites. In a “pinned” tweet that preserves a message at the top of a page, TheBinarySec warns, “Watch every one of your propaganda sites disappear ISIS… When we are done with you there will be nothing left.”
