Joshua Sinai at the
Washington Times offers a review of Hacking ISIS.
Terrorists and their
extremist adherents are adept at utilizing the internet, particularly social
media platforms, which have become widely accessible globally, and in multiple
languages.
These cyberspace platforms
are used to spread their extremist ideologies, raise funding, communicate with
one another, penetrate across borders into foreign countries that would not
permit them to enter physically at their border crossings, and gain new
recruits whose only initial contact with them may be via their personal
computers.
For counterterrorism
agencies, while the primary activity remains to militarily defeat terrorist
groups and their operatives in “physical space,” these online terrorist-related
social media platforms are an important secondary arena to use cyberwarfare
tools to counter the terrorist organizations and their activist supporters who
manage and operate such sites, including countering the extremist propaganda
they propagate.
The veteran al Qaeda (and its
regional affiliates) terrorist group and the relative newcomer Islamic State
(known as ISIS) — which has become the latest “superstar” of Salafi jihadi
terrorism (although it is also nowadays in sharp retreat as a result of the
American-led military coalition campaign against it in Iraq and Syria) are the
leading exploiters and beneficiaries of the Internet’s dissemination
capabilities.
Since it is fairly
straightforward to employ military forces — and specially trained
counterterrorism forces — to defeat such terrorist groups, what are effective
countermeasures against them in cyberspace, where specialized cyberwarfare
tools must be used against them? In answering this question, Malcolm Nance and
Chris Sampson’s “Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad” is an important,
well-researched and detailed reference resource about how al Qaeda, and now,
more prominently, ISIS, operate in cyberspace and the measures required to
counter and defeat what the authors term as “cyber jihad.”
You can read the rest of the review
via the below link:
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