Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-the-islamic-states-propaganda-machine/2015/11/20/051e997a-8ce6-11e5-acff-673ae92ddd2b_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-high_isisprop-115pm:homepage/story

Last week, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne laid out plans for more capabilities for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in response to a “cyber threat” from ISIS.

But it looks like the threats made by some apparent pro-ISIS hackers over social media are overstated.

Recently, a group that calls itself the “Islamic Cyber Army” has been dumping the supposed personal details of government employees and other data on Twitter. However the majority of the information appears to have been sourced from very simple Google searches.

This isn’t the first time pro-ISIS hackers have exaggerated their own hacking capabilities. Junaid Hussain, who moved to Syria to join the terrorist organization, published the names and personal information of 100 US military members. He claimed he had obtained these by hacking Pentagon servers, but it seemed more likely that he also just Googled for them.

Hussain did reportedly have some technical skills, however, with the Wall Street Journal reporting he had developed spyware for ISIS. Hussain was killed in a drone strike in August.

Large-scale cyberattacks that have been linked to pro-ISIS hackers have also turned out to be misattributed. According to researchers from cybersecurity firm FireEye, a hack on the French television channel TV5Monde that was widely reported as the work of a pro-ISIS outfit was actually that of a group of Russian hackers.

In all, it’s worth treating the claims of “ISIS hackers” on social media with a heavy dose of scepticism.

FireEye claims Russian APT28 hacked France’s TV5Monde Channel
http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/37710/hacking/apt28-hacked-tv5monde.html

It’s rare to see physics being used as an effective tool to comment on current events, but astrophysicists Tom van Doorsslaere and Giovanni Lapenta of the Belgian KU Leuven used some simple Newtonian mechanics to show that both the Russian and Turkish accounts of what happened with the downed jet can’t be right.

Using video of the incident and the maps provided by Turkish and Russian officials, they show in a post on a blog run by KU Leuven that what went down couldn’t possibly have happened as both parties present it.