In a press release, the Department of Justice said Malaysian authorities detained Ardit Ferizi on a USA provisional arrest warrant alleging that he provided material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and committed computer hacking and identity theft violations.
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“Early investigation found the suspect communicated with one of the right-hand man (sic) of IS terrorist group in Syria to hack a few servers containing information and details of USA securities personnel and team”, Malaysian police said. “The details were then transferred to the operation unit of the IS group for further action”.
According to a lengthy affidavit filed by FBI special agent Kevin Gallagher, who is based out of the Washington field office, Ferizi had unauthorized access to a federal computer and used that access to obtain email addresses, cities of residence, dates of birth and other personal identifying information on 1,351 government and military workers, and passed those names onto the Islamic State terrorist group between April and August. If convicted, he could face up to 35 years in prison, the justice department said. That document said, “We are in your emails and computer systems, watching and recording your every move”. The U.S.is said to be seeking his extradition to the U.S.to stand trial.
“While these individuals never demonstrated an extremely high level of technical sophistication that we typically associate with state-sponsored actors in China or Russian Federation, they were able to successfully use crude but effective data mining techniques to gather outwardly relatively innocuous information that, when put into the wrong hands, could be quite harmful”, said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism analyst for NBC News.
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U.S. Assistant Attorney General John Carlin called the case against Ferizi – which combines cybercrime and terror charges as US authorities aim to step up their crackdown on ISIS – “a first of its kind”.
