Anonymous, 'hunters' claim to thwart Islamic State online

Elizabeth Weise | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption ISIS calls Anonymous 'idiots' after cyber threat Hacking collective Anonymous has pledged cyberwarfare against ISIS after the Paris attacks, but will those efforts really affect the terror group?

SAN FRANCISCO — While the Islamic State has had much success using social media to get its message out, a loose band of activists who go by the name "hunters" are just as busy trying to shut it down.

The hactivist group Anonymous, the most well-known of these hunters, tweeted Wednesday that more than 6,080 Islamic State Twitter accounts had been disabled due to its efforts.

Ghost Security Group, which goes by the name GhostSec, collects reports of Islamic extremist groups and works to remove their content.

These sometimes overlapping groups are called "hunters," said Veryan Khan, editorial director with the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, a private firm that collects information on terrorism.

"Hunting groups are volunteer cyber militias," she said. Based all over the world, "they like to play Whack-a-Mole, their funnest thing in the whole world is to go in and take these groups down."

Cyber word-fare

An Anonymous account claimed to have launched concerted online attacks against radical Islamic terrorists in January after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris.

The war of words and actions online has heated up again after the terrorist attacks that killed 129 people in Paris on Friday.

A discussion channel on the messaging service Telegram that appeared to be devoted to the Islamic State called Anonymous "idiots" on Wednesday.

Anonymous has, in turn, posted guides giving readers instructions on how to hack into Islamic State-affiliated systems.

Supporters of the Islamic State have posted their own guide detailing how to work around hactivist efforts to shut down its social media work, in Arabic.

While no online vigilante group can entirely block something as amorphous as the Islamic State, it can slow down the efforts of terrorist groups targeting young people for recruitment through social media and the Internet.

Because it is so dependent on social media to get its message out, these online efforts have been able to slow the Islamic State's efforts, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor of communication at McGill University in Montreal who studies Anonymous.

She has been monitoring online discussions about the efforts and sees a very broad range of people working on the anti-Islamic State campaigns. They include French hackers, military geeks, Syrians who are being harmed by the Islamic State, some Tunisians and some Palestinian hackers who live overseas.

"The more of these sites we can disable, the less voice they have in the community," said Scott White, director of computing and security technology at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

However, he warned that shutting down the avenues of communication is a double-edged sword. It stems Islamic State propaganda, but also takes away a venue where the intelligence community can collect information.

The FBI declined to comment on the activities of the cyber vigilantes.

Terms of Service

Most social media sites take down terrorist postings as soon as they become aware of them. Last year Islamic State supporters threatened Twitter employees with death for removing their accounts.

But while Twitter, Facebook, Google and others all monitor for such material, given their sheer size it's difficult to find all such postings. Hactivists aid in that effort by reporting breaches of a site's terms of service, said White.

For example Telegram, a popular instant messaging service that emphasizes privacy, posted Wednesday that it had blocked 78 Islamic State-related chat channels across 12 languages, which had been reported to it.

Facebook said it worked aggressively to ensure there were no terrorists or terror groups using the site and removed any content that praised or supported terrorism.

The site's 1.5 billion users flag content that is inappropriate and it has a global team responding to those reports around the clock. Terrorism-related reports are prioritized for immediate review, the company said in an emailed statement.

More to come

Anonymous on Sunday released a video in French saying it would punish the Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris on Friday.

Wearing the group's trademark Guy Fawkes mask, an unidentified man called the terrorists "vermin" and said "Anonymous activists from all over the world will hunt you down."

"So get ready for a massive reaction from Anonymous. Know that we will find you and we will never let up. We're going to launch the biggest ever operation against you. Expect very many cyber attacks against you. War is declared," the announcer says.