Interestingly, more often than not it was the victim who initiated travel to Syria, not the recruiter. They were then referred to another contact who would have a detailed action plan ready. They provided guidance on how to buy a plane ticket to Turkey and which were the best airports to fly from so you wouldn’t get stopped. Leave at a time of day when you wouldn’t be missed or tell your parents you were going to a friend’s house after school. They would tell their targets to erase their hard drives or, better still, take the hard drive with you. The plan was to leave no trace behind .Sadly, many young people right across Europe got caught up in this process and left for Syria. On arrival in Turkey they would often be met by Islamic State smugglers who would help them across the Syrian border and into training camps. Once there, messages would be sent from their profiles telling other “suitable” friends of the amazing time they were having. Whether it was even them writing the messages we will never know. Many who left for Syria have never been heard from again. A few now wish to return to the UK, USA and other European nations and those governments are faced with the difficult choice of managing these cases.

Online “radicalisation” and cybercrime

In my work helping companies with security, we are increasingly seeing cyber-attackers engaging in a very similar process to that just described. They find a member of staff, befriend them using a fake profile and bond with them to start introducing ideas about how the company they work for is corrupt or is committing immoral acts. They start asking them to steal data from the company, usually by photographing it on their phones. They will always feed some sort of “us versus themˮ narrative to their target and often paint what they are doing as activism. The company loses data, money and may even collapse. You may think that this could never work on me, that I could never be radicalised like this. However, there’s always a narrative that works, it’s just a matter of finding what it is. We are all of us different but each one of us can be got at, manipulated and fed a story that could take you down a path you never thought you would find yourself on.