A Hacker Replaced 200 ISIS Twitter Accounts With Links to Gay Porn
It's juvenile, immature, and totally hilarious.
Anonymous really, really doesn’t like ISIS. Sure, they occasionally dabble in domestic terrorism as well, but most of the hackers in the amorphous international collective known as Anonymous have publicly admitted that they’re doing everything they can to mess with ISIS sympathizers’ presence on the world wide web. On Saturday, a homophobic terrorist who pledged allegiance to ISIS carried out a horrific shooting in Orlando that killed 49 people, and ISIS social media accounts were quick to celebrate the victory, even though the terrorist group’s leadership apparently had nothing to do with the shooting.
ISIS users usually have propaganda-filled Twitter profiles, with images of their black flag and violent acts posted openly. But on Tuesday, a group of hackers decided to give hundreds of ISIS-affiliated accounts a facelift, breaking into them and changing their profile pictures to the gay pride flag or bastardized versions of the ISIS flag that read “We Fuck Goats.” The latter one is probably more offensive to the goats, but “WauchulaGhost,” as the hacker called himself, also changed website links to the CIA.gov site or to popular gay porn websites.
“I did it for the lives lost in Orlando,” WauchulaGhost told Newsweek. “Daesh [ISIS] have been spreading and praising the attack, so I thought I would defend those that were lost. The taking of innocent lives will not be tolerated.”
Jacked is maybe not the best phrasing here, but sure.
Anonymous has already made bold claims about hacking ISIS before. While WauchulaGhost may have gotten some bigger fish in the hack, most of the accounts are small-fry throwaway ISIS pages. The hacked accounts mostly say “Joined June 2016” and have few, if any, tweets before the attack. None of the dozen accounts Inverse was able to find that had “Jacked by a Ghost,” WachulaGhost’s calling card, at the top were more than a month old or had more than a hundred or so followers.
WachulaGhost told Mic that he was originally a member of GhostSec, a branch of Anonymous that has shut down ISIS accounts in the past. He said he had shut down around 245 accounts in the latest attack, but that Twitter had “found his list” and deactivated most of the hacked accounts, which could also explain why the remaining ones were small fish.
Not exactly Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's personal account here.
Still, WachulaGhost was pretty forthcoming with proof of his hacks, posting screenshots taken while he was “taking down” one of the pages.
At this point, it’s doubtful that ISIS is really effectively using Twitter. Any pages with a large amount of followers will be quickly shut down by Twitter security, who say they’ve removed thousands of accounts in the past few years, and encrypted messaging apps are far more efficient ways to communicate online than the very-public Twitter. Still, anytime ISIS gets hit with a gay-pride bomb or made fun of for alleged bestiality is probably a good day for the internet.
