Islamic State Sent You A Friend Request
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עברית (Hebrew)
A group of supporters for the Islamic State terror organization who call themselves the Islamic State Hacking Division has published last week a list of personal information supposedly belonging to humdreds of military personnel and government employess and encouraged terrorists to attack them personally. The group claimed that the information included, among other things, names, e-mail addresses, passwords and phone numbers of people from the air force, the navy, NASA and the port authority of New-York and New-Jersey. The information published allegedly includes credit card details of several high-ranking official of the American government as well as screenshots of private conversations between American state employees on Facebook.
It’s not yet clear whether the information is reliable and true and there’s no indication of it being relevant, nor of the passwords being valid. According to analysts, if the attack proves to be real, then this is evidence of the Islamic State supporters’ increasing efforts to spread information that could use lone wolf terrorists.
This isn’t the first time that bodies connected to the Islamic State leak information relating to the United States. In March 21st this year, the same hacker group published a list containing, allegedly, details of a hundred American military men. That list was also removed instantly from the internet. However, analysts believe that the claim that this was a cyber attack is farfetched and that the information was probably collected from those people’s private accounts on social media, which are available for all to see.
A data analyst and former U.S. military officer urged the public servants to close their Twitter and Facebook acounts, or at least minimize as much as possible their use of social media, lest they aid terrorists or criminals unknowingly. “once you start getting little bits of information, you can add them together to create a picture of an individual.” In addition, the analyst advised public servants to avoid revealing personal information online for fear of blackmails or being tempted to aid the enemy.
Israel also has its share of publishing sensitive information on social networks. There are, for example, several groups on Facebook aimed to help graduates of classified units in networking and finding a job in the field, but they reveal those graduates, thousands of them, as belonging to those classified units. We have to consider, both citizens and security services, that the enemy no longer has to work hard to eavesdrop on us, since we might be those that provide it with all the information.
