Sometimes fake news can be used for good. A group of six young Iraqi hackers this week sneaked porn and disinformation into online propaganda disseminated by the terrorist network Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS.
The hacker group calls itself Daeshgram, a mashup of Instagram and “Daesh,” the Arabic acronym for ISIS. According to an anonymous spokesperson, Daeshgram wants to sew paranoia and distrust among ISIS supporters.
“Our intention was to flood the market with fake Amaq content in order to dilute the credibility of Amaq — a so-called news agency,” the anonymous hacker told Newsweek. “Daesh responded by telling supporters not to trust any of the Amaq links. They even had fights among themselves about the topic and deleted each other from various [messaging app] groups.”
Daeshgram members appear not only to be technically adept, but also to have finely tuned senses of sarcasm. In one hack, the group inserted a pornographic clip into an Amaq news blast intended to announce a new media center. Instead of depicting a rapt audience watching a public address, the video made it appear as though the audience was viewing explicit porn projected on a large screen. The move undoubtedly was intended to remind viewers about the stash of pornography found inside former al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s lair after he was killed.
Daeshgram members also aimed a distributed denial of service attack at Amaq’s website. The DDoS attack forced the site offline, allowing the hackers to replace it with a nearly identical page mocking Daesh ideology.
