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Nerds Shut Down ISIS
Why don’t we hear much about ISIS anymore? Because the Obama Administration, the nerdiest White House since maybe Thomas Jefferson, waged nerd war on ISIS’s Internet assets.
Dina Temple-Raston gives us this riveting report on Operation Glowing Symphony (yes, that name captures what computer wizards feel when they are hammering away at their keyboards creating electronic magic and mayhem), which in November 2016 launched a cyber-attack from Fort Meade, outside of Baltimore, against the websites ISIS used to spread propaganda, raise funds, and recruit terrorists:
By the fall of 2016 there was a team, Joint Task Force ARES; there was a plan called Operation Glowing Symphony, and there were briefings — that had gone right up to the president. It was only then that there was finally a go….
They began moving through the ISIS networks they had mapped for months. Participants describe it like watching a raid team clearing a house, except it was all online. Logging into accounts they had followed. Using passwords they discovered. Then, just as their move through targets started to accelerate, a roadblock: a security question. A standard, “what was your high school mascot”-type security question.
The question: “What is the name of your pet?”
The room quieted down.
“And we’re stuck dead in our tracks,” Neal said. “We all look to each other and we’re like, what can we do? There’s no way we’re going to get in. This is going to stop the 20 or 30 targets after this.”
Then an analyst stood up in the back of the room.
“Sir, 1-2-5-7,” he said.
“We’re like, what?” Neal says.
“Sir, 1-2-5-7.”
“How do you know that? [And he said] ‘I’ve been looking at this guy for a year. He does it for everything.’ And we’re like, all right … your favorite pet. 1-2-5-7.
“And boom, we’re in.”
…Once they had taken control of the 10 nodes, and had locked key people out of their accounts, ARES operators just kept chewing their way through the target list. “We spent the next five or six hours just shooting fish in a barrel,” Neal said. “We’d been waiting a long time to do that and we had seen a lot of bad things happen and we were happy to see them go away.”
And there was something else that [Marine analyst Glowing Symphony conceiver] Neal said was hard to describe. “When you reach through the computer and on the other side is a terrorist organization, and you’re that close, and you’re touching something that’s theirs, that they possess, that they put a lot of time and effort in to to hurt you, that is an incredible rush,” he said. “You have the control to take that away” [Dina Temple-Raston, “How the U.S. Hacked ISIS,” NPR, 2019.09.26].
They began moving through the ISIS networks they had mapped for months. Participants describe it like watching a raid team clearing a house, except it was all online. Logging into accounts they had followed. Using passwords they discovered. Then, just as their move through targets started to accelerate, a roadblock: a security question. A standard, “what was your high school mascot”-type security question.
The question: “What is the name of your pet?”
The room quieted down.
“And we’re stuck dead in our tracks,” Neal said. “We all look to each other and we’re like, what can we do? There’s no way we’re going to get in. This is going to stop the 20 or 30 targets after this.”
Then an analyst stood up in the back of the room.
“Sir, 1-2-5-7,” he said.
“We’re like, what?” Neal says.
“Sir, 1-2-5-7.”
“How do you know that? [And he said] ‘I’ve been looking at this guy for a year. He does it for everything.’ And we’re like, all right … your favorite pet. 1-2-5-7.
“And boom, we’re in.”
…Once they had taken control of the 10 nodes, and had locked key people out of their accounts, ARES operators just kept chewing their way through the target list. “We spent the next five or six hours just shooting fish in a barrel,” Neal said. “We’d been waiting a long time to do that and we had seen a lot of bad things happen and we were happy to see them go away.”
And there was something else that [Marine analyst Glowing Symphony conceiver] Neal said was hard to describe. “When you reach through the computer and on the other side is a terrorist organization, and you’re that close, and you’re touching something that’s theirs, that they possess, that they put a lot of time and effort in to to hurt you, that is an incredible rush,” he said. “You have the control to take that away” [Dina Temple-Raston, “How the U.S. Hacked ISIS,” NPR, 2019.09.26].
Nerds don’t just grow up to rule the world; they save the world from ISIS.
How do you stop bad guys with guns? You hack their file-sharing nodes, delete their folders, and throttle their Web access. Nice work, nerd-soldiers and nerd-President!
http://dakotafreepress.com/2019/09/27/nerds-shut-down-isis/
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