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People from various hacking collectives have tried for several months to block social media accounts that spread propaganda and attempt to recruit fighters for the Islamic State, but those campaigns gained a new energy on Twitter after the Paris attacks.
Hashtags like #OpParis and #OpISIS have allowed the public to see the inner workings of those efforts, which seem to get results. The best-known group involved, the shadowy collective Anonymous, has claimed to have helped take down as many as 20,000 Twitter accounts since the attacks.
But experts have mixed views over whether the tactics risk creating a crude online dragnet that penalizes Arab speakers and sometimes sweeps up journalists and others with no Islamic State links.
On Twitter and on the website Pastebin, Anonymous has issued a rallying cry.
The group also has an extensive how-to list for anyone interested in taking ISIS offline. Those tactics include posting the names of thousands of questionable accounts and deploying a tool that searches certain keywords on social media and uses a bot to report inappropriate behavior to Twitter.
The keyword-search strategy is what hackers say can help shut down ISIS recruiters, but it is also a crude approach that can be controversial. In March, efforts by cybersecurity activists to identify more than 20,000 Twitter accounts of ISIS supporters inadvertently swept up the accounts of news organizations and journalists.
And on Monday, affiliates of GhostSec, a subgroup of Anonymous that claims to have carried out more sophisticated efforts, like infiltrating ISIS message boards, warned against reporting all Arabic tweets.
Other groups, with different motivations and affiliations, claim to use different tactics, and ideological disagreements and infighting can sometimes play out in public.
For example, Ghost Security Group, which claims to help governments with intelligence reports, is not to be confused with the hackers of GhostSec.org. And not all participants in public Anonymous chats support the efforts. “Paris deserved everything it got,” one user wrote in a chat on Tuesday.
The real danger is that keyword search tactics will shut down people who are trying to monitor the Islamic State, warned Lawrence Husick, co-chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Terrorism.
Anonymous Hackers Fight ISIS but Reactions Are Mixed
One interesting quote from the story: "Getting the Islamic State off Twitter would be a monumental task. In a report released in March, the Brookings Institution said there were at least 46,000 active ISIS supporters on Twitter from September to December of last year. Based on geographic data, the most active users were in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and the United States." The US is one of the top 4 countries for active Isis supporters online.
Hashtags like #OpParis and #OpISIS have allowed the public to see the inner workings of those efforts, which seem to get results. The best-known group involved, the shadowy collective Anonymous, has claimed to have helped take down as many as 20,000 Twitter accounts since the attacks.
But experts have mixed views over whether the tactics risk creating a crude online dragnet that penalizes Arab speakers and sometimes sweeps up journalists and others with no Islamic State links.
On Twitter and on the website Pastebin, Anonymous has issued a rallying cry.
The group also has an extensive how-to list for anyone interested in taking ISIS offline. Those tactics include posting the names of thousands of questionable accounts and deploying a tool that searches certain keywords on social media and uses a bot to report inappropriate behavior to Twitter.
The keyword-search strategy is what hackers say can help shut down ISIS recruiters, but it is also a crude approach that can be controversial. In March, efforts by cybersecurity activists to identify more than 20,000 Twitter accounts of ISIS supporters inadvertently swept up the accounts of news organizations and journalists.
And on Monday, affiliates of GhostSec, a subgroup of Anonymous that claims to have carried out more sophisticated efforts, like infiltrating ISIS message boards, warned against reporting all Arabic tweets.
Other groups, with different motivations and affiliations, claim to use different tactics, and ideological disagreements and infighting can sometimes play out in public.
For example, Ghost Security Group, which claims to help governments with intelligence reports, is not to be confused with the hackers of GhostSec.org. And not all participants in public Anonymous chats support the efforts. “Paris deserved everything it got,” one user wrote in a chat on Tuesday.
The real danger is that keyword search tactics will shut down people who are trying to monitor the Islamic State, warned Lawrence Husick, co-chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Terrorism.
Anonymous Hackers Fight ISIS but Reactions Are Mixed
One interesting quote from the story: "Getting the Islamic State off Twitter would be a monumental task. In a report released in March, the Brookings Institution said there were at least 46,000 active ISIS supporters on Twitter from September to December of last year. Based on geographic data, the most active users were in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and the United States." The US is one of the top 4 countries for active Isis supporters online.
