ISIS is using a 24-hour cyber hotline to help militants secretly spread its message and recruit followers in 'virtually every region' of the world, intelligence experts have warned.

Counter-terrorism analysts say the helpdesk is manned by senior operatives around the clock to support fighters using encrypted communication in order to evade the authorities.

The service, which appears to have been running for around a year, has alarmed security officials because it allows thousands of followers to move and plan operations incognito.

ISIS is using a 24-hour cyber hotline to help militants secretly spread its message and recruit followers in 'virtually every region' of the world, intelligence experts have warned

The group's cyber capabilities are becoming increasingly sophisticated and have played a pivotal role in organising attacks around the world, including the Paris atrocities on Friday which have left 129 dead in a series of co-ordinated strikes.

Revelations about the helpdesk emerged after hundreds of hours of observation by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), an independent research organisation at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Aaron F Brantly, a counterterrorism analyst and lead author of the report, told NBC News: 'They've developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning.

'They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror.'

The group's cyber capabilities are becoming increasingly sophisticated and likely played a pivotal role in organising the Paris atrocities on Friday which have left 129 dead in a series of co-ordinated strikes by gunmen and suicide bombers including the massacre of dozens of music fans at the Bataclan (above)

He said the fanatics are 'now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications' which gives them far greater flexibility to conduct operations thousands of miles away its ISIS headquarters in Raqqa, Syria.

The CTC found that the help desk operative closely monitors all the new forms of security and encryption software as they emerge and produce manuals to show how to use them.

They also distribute the tutorials through Twitter and other social media, providing links that allow fighters to access them even after that account has been shut down.

But the helpdesk also has a dual purpose of recruiting and fundraising after developing personal connections with militants.

After monitoring the help desk through online forums, social media and other platforms, CTC researchers found that militants using the service were 'very decentralised'.