Anonymous Declared War against Isis

The well-known hacking collective Anonymous announced itself “at war” with the Islamic State following the attacks in Paris, expanding its “#OpISIS” online campaign. The continuation of operation was announced on 15 November via one of the major Anonymous twitter accounts, @GroupAnon.

The group has published a video (originally in French), where a figure wearing Anonymous’ iconic Guy Fawkes mask addressed the terror group and promised to hunt them down. In the meantime, a loosely related group of hackivists named BinarySec has also confirmed its online stance against Isis.

The industry watchers confirm that opposition to Isis is nothing new amongst hacktivist communities. For example, both BinarySec and Anonymous, more broadly, have been disrupting jihadi online communications for a while now. Their operation began early in 2015 as #OpCharlieHebdo, where Anonymous devoted themselves to rooting out the social media accounts of Isis supporters.

The hackers declared a partial victory in #OpISIS already in February, after they managed to seize control of about 100 Twitter accounts associated with the group. Since February, Anonymous have made use of various tools to hinder Isis on the Internet. They seized social media accounts by guessing passwords or abusing reset emails or flagged them to either Twitter or Facebook to be shut down.

Besides, the hacking group has been using such tools as DDoS attacks, which are designed to overwhelm a destination website with traffic, in order to bring down public Islamic State sites. According to statistics, the hackers have had success, bringing down almost 150 websites, flagging over 100,000 Twitter accounts and reporting about 5,000 propaganda videos.