Anonymous has long had ISIS at the top of their target list. Following the attacks in Paris, Anonymous kicked it up a notch, recruiting legions of hackers to attack ISIS.
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The attacks were successful, shutting down numerous social media accounts, stealing money from terror recruiters and trolling them everywhere on the internet.
Some of the most well publicized battles Anonymous has engaged in with ISIS are their epic “rick-rolling” of terrorists online, and attacking a silicon valley start-up that they have long believed hosted terrorist websites.
Now they are back, asking hackers and non-hackers alike to join the fight to take out ISIS aka Daesh. Here’s some of the transcript of what was said in the most recent video:
“We will not rest as long as terrorists continue their actions around the world. We will strike back against them. We will keep hacking their websites, shutting down their Twitter accounts and stealing their bitcoins. We defend the rights of freedom and tolerance,”
“When they kill innocent civilians in Belgium they hit everybody in Europe. We have to fight back,”
“You don’t have to hack them. If you stand up against discrimination in your country, you harm them much more than by hacking their websites,”
“The Islamic State cannot recruit Muslims in Europe if they are accepted and included in the society. So we want all of you to stand together against discrimination.”
Check it out:
https://youtu.be/pZO3wZE2GEQ
However, the ISIS war against hasn’t been all sunshine and roses. Within a short time of it’s beginning signs began to pop up that it was splitting at the seams, as exposed in a piece on The Verge back in November:
The bulk of the Anonymous efforts have been directed at taking down ISIS-linked Twitter accounts and websites. But on the Twitter side, those reports have been wildly inaccurate, according to a Twitter employee who spoke to The Daily Dot last week. Another investigation by Ars Technica found a number of non-ISIS accounts included in recent dumps, included because they had tweeted snarkily at an ISIS account or simply because they had tweeted in Arabic. Another observer found Kurds, Iranian, Palestinian, and Chechen accounts mixed in with the lists. As he noted, “I’m not saying all of the above are good guys, but they are definitely NOT ISIS.”
Many actors within the campaign seem to be aware of the problem, and accounts today began circulating a message urging participants to remember that “just because a website or post is written in Arabic or is from a person of Muslim faith does not and should not make them a target.” At the same time, the distributed nature of the campaign makes it difficult to enforce such a message uniformly. The missteps have become so pronounced that other Anonymous groups have begun to publicly distance themselves from #OpIsis.
Does Anonymous have the capability to take out ISIS’s digital network? Sound off in the comments below!
