An ISIS group calling itself the “Cyber Caliphate Army” promised to hack Google on Monday, but instead defaced the website addgoogleonline.com, registered to the Indian firm Always Say, which is not connected to Google, although it does offer search engine optimization services to local businesses.
“Keep the promise inshallah (God willing), expect us today,” the group promised. On Monday, visitors to addgoogleonline.com found the CCA logo displayed and “Hacked by: CCA” written on the page. An Islamic song, playing in French, had the words “we will kill you without pity…for Allah alone we wear suicide belts.”
The group announced its Google hack shortly after publishing a list of 35 British websites on Telegram that it was also targeting. These sites, belonging to what seemed to be a random selection of small businesses, included a laminate flooring firm in Wales, a small solar energy company in England, business selling bedroom furniture and a Japanese dance instructor. The attackers called the attacks “A Message to David Cameron.”
Another group of ISIS hackers have been directly threatening Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, in an ongoing assault against American social media sites. These sites have targeted online ISIS operations, as in the suspension of 125,000 Twitter accounts earlier this month for “threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.” Facebook removes content supporting terrorism and says that it works to make sure terrorists are not using the cite.
Michael Smith, advisor to the U.S. Congress and also co-founder of Kronos Advisory, a national security firm, said that he believes the increase in the number of attacks carried out by ISIS hackers shows an increase in their cyber abilities.
Despite the small size of the recent targets in the proposed Google attack, Smith says Monday’s incident demonstrates that ISIS now has more sophisticated capabilities that can damage its enemies interests than Al-Qaeda has had.
Smith told Newsweek that he thinks these activities will become more common. He says “we can reasonably expect to see their hackers’ focus widen from breaking into government systems to collect information about military, intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement officials to doing more dynamic things like attacking critical infrastructure systems.”