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Daesh backers retaliate against Anonymous's #TrollingDay campaign

Daesh supporters published what appears to be names and e-mail addresses belonging to US Army personnel in response to Anonymous's operation to attack the militants on social media.

Daesh supporters on Friday released what appears to be the personal information belonging to enlisted US military personnel in retaliation for hacker collective Anonymous's Internet campaign to defame and degrade the terrorist group.
Twitter accounts tied to Daesh released names, e-mail addresses, and personal addresses of 160 members of the US Army and Marines and claimed to have obtained information on some 700 armed forces personnel.
The Pentagon would not comment on the lists but independent security experts said the information appears to be real even though it may not be the result of recent hacks into military computers.
It is very likely that this is an authentic set of information," said Michael Smith II, chief operating officer of the defense consulting firm Kronos Security. "It does not benefit Daesh's interest to publish false information."
The release of sensitive information about military personnel followed Anonymous's #TrollingDay campaign in which members and supporters of the online collective used Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to attack Daesh affiliated accounts. The #TrollingDay operations is also part of a wider Anonymous campaign to thwart the Daesh presence on the Web that started after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris and picked up after November's coordinated terrorist attacks there that killed 130.
The Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence (SITE) Group, a private intelligence firm in Washington, first reported the appearance of lists of military personnel Friday afternoon. SITE attributed the release to the Cyber Caliphate Army, a hacking group with known Daesh ties.
"We can't confirm that there was any hacking," said Rita Katz, director of SITE, even suggesting that some of the information could be fabricated. "It seems that the group is taking lists from military websites, collecting information from Google, and possibly even releasing bogus information."
Katz says the group has not yet released any information that can't be found through public sources such as Google searches.
Still, she said, "since some of the lists released by the pro- Daesh group are copied from US military sites, it's troubling that people affiliated with Daesh are seeing lists affiliated with the military, regardless of whether it is publicly available or not."
Hackers associated with Daesh have stolen sensitive US military information previously. In October, US prosecutors charged Ardit Ferizi, a citizen of Kosovo living in Malaysia, with stealing the personal information of more than 1,000 US military and federal employees and passing that data along to Daesh.
By Jack Detsch