ISIS: Cyber department

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ISIS is the most prominent and most successful terror organization that exists today. Apart from its cruelty, its most prominent ability is the way it uses the internet media for its own good and publicity. Lately it appears that the organization started allocating resources for cyber-attacks, focusing on hacking news websites, taking advantage of the fact that their security features are limited and old-fashioned. Doing so, ISIS aspires to harm the reputation of the attacked news panels, and create a malicious affect to the news credibility of the articles published by these sites. So far, ISIS’ attempts to attack news websites were unsuccessful, but we can most certainly assume that these attempts shall increase, in view of the lacking ability to protect the data, and the great benefit for the organization, should such attack succeed.

Carl Herberger of Security Magazine website argues that a success of these cyber-attacks will have a few consequences. First, in the short term, the attacked website will no longer appear online and will be unavailable for its clients for some time, from a few minutes, up to a few days, according to the attack success level. In the long term, we shall witness serious reputational damage, assuming the attackers will manipulate the articles published in the website. The reputational damage will be severe.

Cyber-attacks of news websites are not unique to ISIS, and are not only done by terror organizations. During operation “Protective Edge”, between Hamas and Israel during the last summer, both parties used cyber-attacks extensively. At the height of operation “Protective Edge”, the Palestinians were able to hack the broadcasting of the Israeli channel 10, and send propaganda on their behalf. On the other hand, Israel successfully planted a subtitle on its behalf, exposing the true character of Abu Ubayda, the speaker of the organization military arm, the Az al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Moreover, the cyber system is unlimited for news or informative website. It can be done with a variety of platforms. One example of such platform is the SMS sent by Hamas to Israeli mobile numbers, which recurred in various instances.