In an interview with the Herald’s Erin Smith, its executive director, known only as DigitaShadow, says his group has 14 members who operate from the USA, Europe and the Middle East, also taking down countless Twitter accounts, websites and jihadi videos – unless, of course, those sites have “intelligence value”.
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Anonymous group OpParisIntel revealed the details in a statement that it had collected information about the imminent attacks by IS a little more than a week after a series of co-ordinated attacks that left 130 dead and hundreds injured in Paris.
Islamic State has dismissed the threat issued by Anonymous hackers of waging a cyber war, calling them “idiots” for threatening to shut down their Twitter accounts.
Speaking to a group of assembled journalists following the attack, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius asked the media and journalists to adopt the term “Daesh” to refer to the extremist group instead of the “Islamic State” – a name that validates the group’s desire for an Islamic caliphate.
On the first day of OpParis, Anonymous stated that it had taken down over 5,000 IS twitter accounts.
“We are in no way affiliated with Anonymous”, the group clarified. A few critics of this plan believe that this may backfire and lead ISIS to further hide their activities in the future and switch to other social media platforms and messaging services.
NBC News reports Middle East Media Research Institute findings claiming that the terrorist group used Telegram to share “tutorials on manufacturing weapons and launching cyberattacks” and “calls for targeted killing and lone-wolf attacks”. You can find a list of all the twitter accounts in the description.
HERE’s what you should know about Anonymous and larger fight against Islamic State online.
Although the tactic used by Anonymous, to spam ISIS members with the Rick Astley classic “Never Gonna Give You Up”, might sound a bit silly, experts have claimed that it works well.
“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”. “You ought to understand that we will locate you and also we will certainly not let you go.”. We do not forgive.
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To review last week’s timeline, it all started last Friday, November 13, when a group of ISIS terrorists carried out a series of coordinated attacks on various pre-selected targets in Paris.
