Jihadi Networking Site 'Infiltrated,' Webmaster Flustered
Popular jihadi website al Samoud has been hacked—at least that's what the web forum's administrator, Abu al-Aina'a al-Khorasani, says. On al Fallujah message board he warns that his online journal has "been the subject of an ‘infiltration operation.'"
According to Wired's Danger Room blog, al-Khorasani warns his followers on al Fallujah that they should "not enter any of the links that concern these websites, and not even to surf [the content] until you receive the confirmed news by your brothers, Allah-willing." Bummer. What's an up and coming, social media-savvy jihadi to do?
Danger Room spoke with Evan Kohlmann from Flashpoint Partners, who follows jihadi web forums and said that while these sites go down quite regularly, the fact that al-Khorasani admitted his site had been infiltrated is out of the ordinary:
It's an unsettling prospect for security-minded online jihadists, because such sites can be manipulated by a variety of hostile parties in order to harvest a breathtaking amount of personal data on regular visitors."