On April 2nd, 2012, Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick reported for the Washington Post on an 11 day outage of al-Qaeda's main Web forums. According to the article, this is the longest the forums have been offline. In fact, the forum's extended disappearance seems to suggest that they were taken out by a government backed cyberattack.
The cyberattack was somewhat verified by an al-Qaeda forum admin who said that "the media arena is witnessing a vicious attack by the cross and its helpers on the jihadi media castles."
The article also cited a former U.S. State Department counterrorism official who believes that this was a takedown. The last time the al-Qaeda forums went down, British officials replaced an al-Qaeda bomb recipe with a cupcake recipe from Ellen Degeneres.
Explosively delicious . . . I'm sorry, that was poor even by my standards.
Wikimedia
Interestingly, this article raised the debate over whether we should shut down extremist forums or listen in. Shutting down a forum hurts the extremist's ability to communicate with each other, albeit temporarily. Listening in allows U.S. officials to "gather insights into conversations among extremists", but we allow the communications.
The WashPo quoted A. Aaron Weisburd (fellow at the Homeland Security Policy Institute): "The loss of [these] primary forums would deprive al-Qaeda of control over its message . . . [i]t leaves the rank-and-file to guess which messages and which messengers are genuine al-Qaeda and provides undercover operators with new opportunities to disrupt the movement."
There's more to the WashPo article; check it out here.
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