Anonymous vs. Daesh

by edwardmroche

The reverberations of the Daesh attack on teenagers in Paris continue.  Daesh has released videos showing how it is training children to murder non-muslims.  It has threatened to attack the Vatican, and the White House.  At the same time, the cyber war continues.

The original fight between Daesh and Anonymous started when Daesh hijacked a single Anonymous Twitter feed.  After that, Anonymous has continued a regular series of attacks against Daesh, regularly releasing names, id’s, passwords, associated IP addresses and other information on thousands of Daesh internet accounts.  Anonymous released a series of videos in French promising to take further actions against Daesh, and soon.

On November 19th, 2015, Anonymous announced that it had taken down 5,500 Daesh accounts in response to being called “idiots”. This is called #OpParis.  “The Anonymous vs ISIS showdown is only the beginning, with Anonymous vowing to wipe the Internet stage of all ISIS activity, rendering ISIS impotent of their recruiting network online.”

At the same time, Daesh is sending out as many as 96,000 recruitment emails per day, all aimed at getting sympathizers in the West.

This conflict is an example of how cyber war will develop.  There are a number of basic functions in a cyber conflict:

  • Breaking and exposure of the security of enemy Internet accounts;
  • Use of the subculture of hackers instead of the type of organized response found in a military;
  • Sabotage of web servers, and attempts to interfere with Internet facilities of all types of the enemy;
  • Lack of transparency in what is happening, or even what has happened.

It is unlikely that a cyber arms control treaty will be able to identify all of the specific violations or attacks that may take place.  Any attempt to write out a treaty with complete rationalist comprehensiveness is futile.  Instead, the world will need to stick to generalist principles.