Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders An analysis of the hacking groups allying themselves to Daesh/ISIS has shown that about 18 months ago the religious fanatics stopped trying to develop their own secure communications and hacking tools and instead turned to the criminal underground to find software that actually works. Kyle Wilhoit, a senior security researcher …
The head of your church of sky fairy just asked the sky fairy to bless an aircraft carrier to go and blow up the people of that sky fairy. Ironically they are the same sky fairy
I hope this doesn't offend the FSM or he will send his pirates to deal with the HMS QE
"I hope this doesn't offend the FSM or he will send his pirates to deal with the HMS QE".
Nah, he'll just point and laugh at all the sailors on the flight deck wagging their fingers at him as if to say "naughty naughty". It's not like they've got any planes or weapons worth a damn on it right now.
"chose "HIT" "LER" for the random enigma initialization setting"
The way I heard it was that Bletchley Park searched messages known to contain obligatory plaintext such as 'Heil Hitler'. Also weather reports, considered to be of lower importance by the Germans so they used repeating formatting and terminology.
So now, just assume an "Allahu Akbar" in each message.
Not quite. Enigma had a flaw that it couldn't encrypt a letter to itself so a known plaintext gave you a start.
But the operating procedure involved chosing a random daily pair of 3 letter groups, encrypt them in the code of the day and send them (encrypted) to the other party ( I forget the details)
Eventually they will improve their skills.
I am o!d enough to remember the mockery of the ear!y attempts by the Japanese to make motorbikes and cars.
Sadly, eventually any group that persists at a task will increase skill levels. Sounds like they are already becoming more commercial!y aware and realising you don't have to write all the code yourself.
and the repeat 20 years later of China copying Japanese (and everybody else's) motorbikes and cars.
Though still not up to a Ninja, Triumph or a Ducati the Chinese bikes now are a vast improvement over those 5 years ago - let alone 10.
Fair point.
Pretty much the same reason I would never (again) touch a car where the electrics had been done by the French.
Disclosure - I have had Peugeots and Renaults and they have all had severe electrical faults -even to the point where the electric motor for the rear passenger window caught fire (Megane). Never again.
I'll stick with Ford from now on.
Sadly, eventually any group that persists at a task will increase skill levels.Not if there are no survivors (which is the direct result of forgetting to scrub GPS metadata from pictures taken for propaganda purposes
Given the levels of "military intelligence", I can just see one of these scuzbuckets taking a shot, changing the GPS data to that of the nearest yankee base, and tptb ordering a self-inflicted airstrike... The last words of the drone pilot being "Hey, that 'rab looks just like you!"
For every story of successful evolution there are many stories of failure, I'm thinking of the glorious Eastern European bikes like the MZ50. Not all newborns survive and that's without their massive death cult (I may have misspelled that) mentality and thousands of drone operating uber nerds that oppose them. Add in all the Russian cyber nutters, Anonymous keyboard killers and western intelligence agency geeks.....
I hate tp daesh their hopes but I think most will be collecting their virgins fairly soon.
In any individual group which align to a more central ideology, you are going to have those that have good skills and those that are idiots. Saying all the failures belong to the central ideology is flawed. It's like saying some random kiddy group that identifies with Anonymous being idiots and getting caught means that the core Anonymous group are all shit hackers as well as other successful offshoots such as Lulsec.
All it takes is for one skill hacker to decide they want to help Daesh and it could change things dramatically.
Also consider successful undetected hacks will not be known about. Maybe they already exist but we are only aware of their obvious failures, partly because of the propaganda machine wanting people to know to deter them from making contact with the evil ones.
As much as we detest security by obscurity, not publishing information about where Daesh is failing would be beneficial. Let them keep making the same mistakes...
I should have gone with Skoda which first popped in to my head. Figured the Skoda owners would come along and tell me how good they are these days, hence the Robin which no one would defend...except its name!
Those school reports about attention to details might have been right...
"The Sons of the Caliphate Army are another online group who caused a brief stir when they claimed to have plans to kill Mark Zuckerberg."
Errmm... how does this make them special? Or even particularly notable? I'm sure that there might be one or two (dozen) of the assembled commentariat who might have similar desires.
Mujahideen's Secrets was basically just a branding operation for their fanclub. Al Qaeda's fanclub by the way, not IS, though this was before the split so part of it presumably went over to IS afterwards.
The purpose was just to give wannabe jihadis a sense of belonging and signal being part of something, like branded merchandise or collectibles if we are to compare it with rock star or sports fans (or a more conventional political group for that matter).
It was never actually intended to be used for operations.
"While some of the groups mentioned above have solicited Bitcoin donations to help them buy weapons, scammers have adopted their tactic and Islamic State stylings, diluting the amount of donations that reach extremists."
The enemy of my enemy... Is still my enemy, actually, but I'm perfectly willing to stand watching from the sidelines saying "Let's you and him fight!"
...and laughing.
Maybe if they weren't so preoccupied with denying their women education and work opportunities they could recruit a few decent software designers from that side of the gene pool.
I occurs to me that we could guard against malicious usage by ISIS by making our next western computer language of fad rife with references to Deities and Prophets. Can't see any Jihadist using a language that calls for $DEITY to throw an error, or testing $PROPHET for existence.
Yes, I'm joking.
If your enemy is dumb enough, e.g., to leave useful meta data on their uploads don't FFS tell him you have noticed. Or that you recognised the location that propaganda video was made by the unique rock formation in the back ground. STFU and get on with using such information to your advantage. Johnny clever is Johnny schtum - unless you a making a play to get your enemy to change to even more revealing procedures.
Once they realise how bad they are, they will outsource the job to Crapita / IBM / HPE and after a few years and umpteen $$Bn they will still not have a working system.
There will however be a group of heavily armed fantasists further crazed by dealing with Crapita / IBM / HPE and hell bent on revenge ....
Do keep in mind the *real* origins of Al Qeda, the Taliban and others of this ilk.
What has precipitated over the 30 some years since they were fired up (by western powers) is a downward spiral of rational thought, polarized religious education, misguided logic (thus utter fail). The result is eventually a combination of bad logical processing in a large portion of the population, assumption that what an individual "leader" says is always and must be the most powerful of truths, and an overwhelming fear of anything that does not equate to or parallel the guidance of the "leader".
It is rather interesting that if one looks at the summary of the 'result' it can be applied to cultures *outside* of Daesh.
What has precipitated over the 30 some years since they were fired up
The only difference between the modern groups and older ones is the level of hardware that they have access to. Terrorist groups have existed throughout history and, in that context, the only notable thing about modern ones is that their reach and impact is extended by modern technology.
Sure - the current crop were happily groomed and funded by the West in their many proxy wars against the Soviets, but groups throughout history have been funded by $BIG_EMPIRE against $OTHER_BIG_EMPIRE.
US to obscure arms exports after Pentagon ‘pipeline’ to Syria exposed
Get me Victor Bout on the phone, there is business,,, oh, wait, we locked him up.
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Conscription used to be such a rite of passage; "a year in the Army will make men out of boys!"
Also had the advantages of throwing young people of different socioeconomic strata in with each other, and creating an army of the people in stead of only military professionals, with its concomitant danger of clumping only gung-ho types together to develop into a right-wing society within the larger society. Oh, and giving kids a year off from school, which is developing into an unbroken slog of decades from kindergarten to university, to let them figure out what they want to become.
Humongous benefits which seem to have been left out of the calculus of countries (yes, western Europe, I'm looking at you) which have abolished conscription in the last few decades.
Huge non benefits of conscription for those who were killed
e.g. Conscription in UK was in place for (what turned out to be totally pointless) Korean War.
I know someone who fought in it (conscripted) and lost a great many of their unit (friends) in night time attack on their camp
but... but... but.... computers are western technology, the spawn of the infidel. Surely ISIS should be chucking off tall buildings any of their followers who contaminate themselves by using them.
Oh, and tall buildings are also western technology, they should be chucking off tall buildings any ISIS followers who use tall buildings.
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