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Hackers Infiltrate Taliban Website, Much to the Surprise of the Taliban

by Amar Toor on June 11, 2010 at 12:25 PM

screenshot from al fallujah
If you happen to be a fan of the Taliban, you may now have another thing to worry about besides your psychological well-being: hackers. As Wired reports, a Taliban-endorsed, online jihadi forum has apparently come under cyber-siege from people who, shock of shocks, disagree with what the radical Islamic organization espouses. Abu al-Aina'a al-Khorasani, the administrator of the belligerent forum (pictured above), recently warned in a post that the "group's main site and the site of its online journal Al-Sumud, have been the subject of an 'infiltration operation.'" He also warned his group's acolytes: "[Do] not enter any of the links that concern these Web sites, and [don't even] surf [the content] until you receive the confirmed news by your brothers, Allah-willing."

Believe it or not, we don't spend a whole lot of our days browsing through the Taliban's online network. But, according to Flashpoint Partners' Evan Kohlmann, the extremists' sites have been repeatedly forced offline by hatred haters. An all-out Infiltration, on the other hand, is apparently a new development. "It's an unsettling prospect for security-minded online jihadists, because such sites can be manipulated by a variety of hostile parties in order to harvest a breathtaking amount of personal data [from] regular visitors," Kohlmann says. And, as Wired reported last year, the Pentagon has officially stated its intent to shut down the Taliban's online media forums in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The invasion may have taken the Taliban by surprise, but we're not completely sure why. They are, after all, the Taliban. If you go around stoning women to death because they dare to try and get an education, you should probably expect to see some sort of digital backlash. [From: Wired]

Tags: afghanistan, AfghanistanWar, cyberattack, extremists, hack, hacking, islam, jihad, taliban, terrorism, top, web

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