Operation ISIS / #OpISIS

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Overview

Operation ISIS (also known as #OpISIS and #OpIceISIS) is an ongoing Anonymous-led hacktivist campaign aimed at infiltrating various social media accounts and websites affiliated with the Islamist terrorist organization ISIS.

Background

The hacktivist campaign against the ISIS' social media propaganda was first announced under the name Operation NO2ISIS on June 21st, 2014, shortly after one of the collective's Twitter accounts @TheAnonMessage got hacked by ISIS supporters and vandalized with graphic images of violence. The operation initially sought to bring down the government websites of at least three countries that have been suspected of funding or supporting the terrorist group, but the scope of the mission broadened as the ISIS' sphere of influence continued to grow in the Middle East, as well as their social media presence.

In early January 2015, the Anonymous war against ISIS took a momentous turn with the launch of #OpCharlieHebdo in the wake of the armed terrorist attacks against the French satirical news magazine's headquarters in Paris, which resulted in the deaths of a dozen of writers, cartoonists and police officers.

Notable Developments

On February 8th, 2015, Anonymous uploaded a YouTube video announcing a new wave of cyberattacks that would involve hacking into websites, email, Facebook and Twitter accounts that are known to be owned and used by ISIS members to recruit new terrorists. The video points out that Anonymous is an extremely wide group, whose members come from a variety of social, religious and racial backgrounds, and that they will hunt down ISIS, considered, a la Sylvester Stallone's "Cobra", as a "virus" against which Anonymous is the "cure"^[2]:

Transcript

Greetings citizens of the world, we are Anonymous, Operation ISIS Continues: First we need to clarify few a things. We Are: Muslims, Christians, Jews… We Are hackers, crackers, Hacktivist, phishers, agents, spies, or just the guy from next door. We Are students, administrators, workers, clerks, unemployed, rich, poor, We are young, or old, gay or straight. We wear smart clothes or rugs, we are hedonists, ascetics, joy riders or activists. We come from all races, countries, religions, and ethnicity. UNITED AS ONE, DIVIDED BY ZERO… We Are Anonymous. -REMEMBER…THE TERRORISTS THAT ARE CALLING THEMSELVES ISLAMIC STATE,(ISIS), ARE NOT MUSLIMS!!!. -ISIS; We will hunt you, Take down your sites, Accounts, Emails, and expose you… From now on, no safe place for you online… You will be treated like a virus, And we are the cure… We Own The Internet… We are Anonymous, We are Legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, Expect us.

Within the first 24 hours of the announcement, Anonymous claimed to have successfully disabled more that 80 ISIS-affiliated accounts on Twitter and warned its followers to "keep a close eye" on certain Facebook accounts that are considered to have ties to ISIS^[2]. By the third day into the operation, Anonymous hackers had managed to take down more than 1,000 websites, 800 Twitter accounts, a dozen of Facebook pages and 50 email accounts suspected of being run by ISIS members or supporters, according to a list published by the group via Pastebin. The outcome of the Anonymous attack quickly spread across major news outlets, as well as in the tech and cybersecurity blogosphere.

On March 10th, 2015, Anonymous shut down an ISIS website called Kelafabook, or 5elafabook, also colloquially named "The ISIS' Facebook", an ISIS backed social network used by ISIS supporters to share informations on the organization among them, and launched only a few days prior (March 8th, 2015). Shortly afterwards, ISIS reportedly put an image on Kelafabook's homepage with a long text in English claiming that the site has been temporarily shut down and that ISIS will carry on their objective no matter the cost.^[12]

#OpParis

On November 14th, 2015, Anonymous uploaded a video message^[15] declaring a war against ISIS in response to the latter's attacks in Paris from the previous week that left more than 129 people dead and several hundreds more injured. In the video, a French-speaking representative of the hacktivist group addressed the members of Islamic State its intention to "hunt them down" by launching another massive cyber attacks against its websites and social media accounts (shown below in French and English).

“You should know that we will find you and we will not let you go."
“Expect massive cyber attacks. War is declared. Get prepared."
“The French people are stronger than you and will come out of this atrocity even stronger.”

Under the banner #OpParis, the latest wave of Anonymous' efforts against the Islamic State was also jointly announced by @GroupAnon^[14], one of the main social media outlets of the group, as well as the newly-created ad-hoc Twitter account @OpParis.^[13] In the following days, thousands of pro-ISIS Twitter accounts were allegedly taken down by Anonymous hackers.

On November 16th, members of the ISIS issued a response^[17] to the hacktivist group's warning of cyber attacks via its channel "Elite Section of IS" on the messaging app Telegram, the same platform that the former group used to claim responsibility for the terror attacks in Paris (shown below).

"O' brothers of tawheed This message have reach to All Ansar for the importance. The Anonymous hackers threatened in a new video release that they will carry out a major hack operation on the Islamic state (idiots) what they gonna hack all what they can do is hacking Alansar twitter accounts, emails .etc. [sic]"

As of November 17th, @OpParis^[18] claims that over 5,500 accounts associated with the Islamic State had been taken down as a result of the campaign.

Troll ISIS Day

On December 3rd, 2015, a text file was posted to Ghostbin^[19] announcing that Operation ISIS was planning a "Troll ISIS Day," during which participants would go to various social networks to breach ISIS accounts and share mocking photos of the group using the hashtags #Daesh and #Daeshbags, both of which are derogatory labels for the terrorist organization.

"[…] on December 11th we will show them that we are not afraid,we will not just hide
in our fear, we are the majority and with our strength in numbers we can make a real difference. We will mock them for the idiots they are. We will show them what they really are they do not stand for a religion, they do not stand for a god, they are brainwashers teaching from the young to the old their propaganda against the 'west' when in reality they are just increasing the distance between countries by giving many a bad name."

In the following days, the news sites IBI Times^[20] and Express^[21] reported that a series of coordinated demonstrations against ISIS would be held on December 11th in major cities around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, Vancouver, Paris, Madrid and Cannes, among many others. On December 11th, several tens of thousands of participants on Twitter began sharing a variety of photoshopped parodies ridiculing ISIS using the predesignated hashtags (#Daesh and #Daeshbags), as well as hijacking an additional list of Arabic keywords, phrases and hashtags thought to be closely affiliated with ISIS propaganda.