ISIS Hacked? Group Claims Responsibility For Taking Down ISIS Websites

A group of Muslim hackers standing in opposition to the Islamic State have claimed responsibility Friday for taking websites run by the militant group offline, after launching a coordinated hacking campaign against the group.

Groups of hackers taking part in the organized effort, dubbed the #SilenceTheSwords campaign, are believed to have knocked the primary news organization for ISIS offline. Other hackers are claiming to have infiltrated the terrorist organization’s lines of communication and other websites.

The primary achievement of the hacking campaign was the take down of the Amaq news agency, an online outlet that is linked to the Islamic State. The publication regularly publishes claims of responsibility for terrorist acts and is used as a recruiting tool to attract people to the Islamic State through the internet.

The site was confirmed offline following the hacking effort, organized under the hashtag #paralyzingAmaq on Twitter. Visitors to the Amaq website are presented with a 404 error and the website is generally unresponsive.

The hacking groups partaking in the effort also took a page out of Russia’s playbook and began creating fake news sites and stories designed to sow confusion and dissention among Islamic State members.

Led by the efforts of an Iraqi hacking group called “Daeshgram,” the hackers were able to create more than 40 decoy websites that look almost identical to the original Islamic State sites they are meant to represent. The fake sites are littered with false information about the terrorist organization. Other sites display pornographic images in an effort to anger the more conservative members of ISIS.

Other hackers involved in the campaign have claimed to hijacked the encrypted communications channels used by members of ISIS, including groups organized through the secure messaging platform Telegram. While the hackers have threatened to post communications from those channels, they have yet to do so.

Raphael Gluck, a media consultant who has tracked ISIS activity online, raised doubts about the legitimacy of the supposed hack, especially regarding the compromise of ISIS communication channels on Telegram.

According to Gluck, there is “no trace” of hackers taking over pro-ISIS Twitter or Facebook accounts and the Telegram accounts that were supposedly hacked were “likely engineered...by the very hackers who’ve hacked them.”

Gluck did note that several ISIS websites, including the Amaq news agency site, were indeed taken offline —though he said the organization’s online radio service, called Bayan, has remained online throughout the supposed hack.

Earlier this month, the hackers responsible for Friday’s effort claimed to have hacked a mailing list organized by the Amaq news outlet. The hackers released the names and email addresses on the list, effectively outing as many as 2,000 people subscribed to the pro-ISIS mailing list.