Personally, I have investigated the matter of the Islamic State cyber-caliphate and all clues led back to Russia. Now others are investigating the same thing and forming the same conclusions. Fundamentally we are in a new dimension of a Cold War tactic using the internet as the platform. So far the Obama administration ignores this but military generals are sounding the alarms.
Why Are Russian Hackers Posing as ISIS Propagandists?
The multi-front cyberspace information war in which we recently have found ourselves just got a little more complicated.
A group which calls itself Cyber Caliphate, assumed to have ties to the terrorist group ISIS, may in fact be a creation of Russian hackers taking advantage of the havoc wrecked on social media and the Internet by ISIS propagandists.
The complex picture this presents adds to the challenges faced by the U.S. government as it seeks to adjust its counterterrorism communication and cybersecurity measures to deal with rising threats from abroad.
According to a new report, “Who Is Cyber Caliphate? Re-examining the Online ISIL Threat,” produced by the State Department’s Office of Diplomatic Security (DS), a major cyber attack on French television TV5Monde last April by Cyber Caliphate hackers took the station off the air for 20 hours and exposed employee email accounts.
It was more sophisticated than anything previously seen from ISIS hackers.
French and American investigators tracking the electronic footprints of the hackers found they led to a Russian hacker group known as APT28, which usually hack in favor of the Russian government and directs its efforts at NATO.
In fact, they found no electronic tracks leading back to ISIS. Russian information warfare, which has intensified massively over the past several years, is taking ever changing twists and turns, and this one took investigators by surprise.
Russian hackers are greatly more sophisticated than the ISIS variety.
The Diplomatic Security report does, however, also stress the heavy influence of ISIS on Twitter in particular, as it seeks to create radicalized followers among disaffected and alienated Muslim youth in Western societies.
From September to December, 2014 alone, an estimated 46,000 Twitter accounts were associated with ISIS, the group’s most potent method to reach into impressionable minds.
Under the new leadership of Rashad Hussein at the U.S. Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication of the State Department (CSCC,) the policy of the U.S. government is to counter terrorism propaganda with a positive message, presenting a more attractive vision in the war of ideas.
This strategy dovetails with the administration’s dubious argument that terrorist acts arise from populations deprived of economic opportunity and have to be dealt with by addressing “root causes,” like poverty.
The new counterterrorism approach is a departure from the work of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication under the recently departed Ambassador Alberto Fernandez, who took a harder line, attacking ISIS (and Cyber Caliphate) propagandists head on, and exposing graphically the brutality and horrors perpetrated by ISIS terrorists.
For this tough and confrontational approach, Fernandez was heavily criticized in the U.S. media and shunned by the executive branch.
With Russian hackers parading as ISIS propagandists, we now seem to have a perfect storm.
The complexity of cyber conflict certainly suggests that the U.S. government must intensify and improve its own efforts to outsmart our enemies.
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By Jack Murphy at SofRep in part:
ISIS feeds the West loaded information
There is no proof that Russian intelligence has a hand in ISIS information/propaganda operations. However, considering what we have discussed thus far, this scenario should be taken seriously. ISIS is actively gaming the psychological makeup of Western audiences in order to provoke the United States and allied nations into a full-blown military confrontation with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. If the hypothesis about Russian influence agents in ISIS is correct, and if they are participating in ISIS propaganda efforts, then we should ask why Russia would be interested in doing this to begin with.
The answer is fairly straightforward. Keeping America bogged down and preoccupied in the Middle East is of massive benefit to the Russian Federation. By goading America into another war in the Middle East, Russia has more opportunity to engage in military aggression in Ukraine, Dagestan, Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Akbazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and on and on throughout Russia’s near abroad. For sure, there would also be some more specific tactical and strategic goals, but in the general sense, the Gulf War III would help keep America off Russia’s back.
ISIS, and perhaps Russian intelligence, understands America’s future rationalizations for war very well. In the past we could justify war as being battles against communism or fascism for the preservation of the American way of life. Before that, more jingoistic narratives about manifest destiny were brought into play. But these justifications for war, racial or nationalistic, will have no place in future liberal Western nations. Instead wars will be justified as fights for gay rights, women’s rights, and other equality issues. One hypothetical example: Americans will be told that we have to invade Iran because gays are stoned to death or beheaded by the Iranian regime.
The Islamic State knows that there is no better way to terrify and incite Americans than to use mass executions, the murder of Christians, the use of sex slaves, the destruction of ancient relics, and the killing of homosexuals. ISIS is at war with Western consciousness, and it is a very deliberate effort.
