The international hacking collective Anonymous has begun posting alleged personal information of suspected ISIS extremists.
This comes just a few days after Anonymous declared “war” on ISIS, after the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in Paris last weekend.
Anonymous has already collected lists of Twitter accounts and websites belonging to ISIS in order to take them down, and the group claims to have already successfully taken some of those sites and accounts down.
The group also leaked alleged personal information about suspected ISIS members. In one instance, an Anonymous Twitter account on Monday evening shared a bunch of names found from an alleged “jihadist site,” preceding that list with a message: “ISIS we are coming for you.”
Anonymous has been busy shutting down social media accounts and websites linked to ISIS since January, when the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked by terrorists. Shortly after that event, Anonymous claimed to have taken down nearly 800 Twitter accounts and 50 email addresses associated with ISIS.
However, Anonymous has wrongly identified people, including alleged extremists from ISIS and Al Qaeda, in the past. So, it’s important to not begin a witch hunt for these people based on this information alone.
Anonymous operates almost exclusively online and does most of its “activist” work through hacking and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which basically overload servers with tons of bogus requests. Anonymous has also been known to inundate phone networks with spammy phone calls, among other things, in order to disrupt communications.
