The staggeringly savvy use of technology by the Daesh terrorists who attacked Paris on the 14th of November has taken the world by surprise. Right from the start, the ISIS group has used videos to keep up a grisly one-way communication with the people it wants to target. But that’s just a minor demo of how they can use technology.
They quickly went on to use social media to scale up their organisation. Boldly using hundreds of Twitter accounts, the terrorists have managed to attract large numbers of young people into joining their fold.
Clearly, they’ve mastered social engineering.
But most startling has been the idea that they used Sony’s Playstation gaming console to plan and coordinate their attacks. This is entirely unconfirmed, but it’s still a frightening possibility.
For a long period of eight months, the terrorists have managed to escape surveillance and intelligence agencies in this way. While governments focus on ‘listening’ to various other forms of communication such as calls or email or messaging, the terrorists zeroed in on a peer-to-peer system much more difficult to eavesdrop on. No doubt, having remained undetected for such a length of time has contributed hugely to their confidence.
But if anyone can outsmart the terrorists at their use of technology it’s hackers, and who better than Anonymous, the cyber-activists. Right after the Paris attacks,
the group (though of course it could be someone else in their name) has posted a video on YouTube declaring war on ISIS and Daesh. Speaking in French, the Guy Fawkes-masked person in the video issued a threat to ISIS warning them to expect cyber attacks from all over the world and that they were better hackers.
Anonymous has indeed helped to expose 3,824 Twitter accounts of ISIS recruiters before, so theirs may not be an idle threat. If they make good on it, it would surely be welcomed by the world in the present day when terrorists have perfected a way of working that doesn’t make it necessary for them to be in any one place. With their chilling call to new recruitees to stay where they are and contribute from their home base, any help that Anonymous could give would be critical in combating the caliphate. Some think, more effective than bombs.
In the meanwhile, the global leaders gathered at the G20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey, pledged to stop spying on each other for economic and political gain on cyberspace.
What they need in addition is a comprehensive plan to use resources meant previously for this purpose to be directed at rooting out ISIS online. The UK finance minister, George Osborne, has warned that the ISIS group is in all likelihood going to go beyond using the internet for propaganda, radicalisation and operational reasons, will go on to cyber attacks. This of course makes it all the more imperative to form a massive plan to counter such a possibility.
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
