Just weeks after releasing the details of 3,000 Brooklynites, a hacker collective aligned to the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has disseminated another hit list among its supporters on the privacy app Telegram.
The 800 names did not originate from a prime U.S. metropolitan hub though, but the rural southeastern state of Arkansas. The target? The Arkansas Library Association.
ISIS released the identities of 800 library workers from backwater towns in Arkansas last month, as well as their addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers. A small prize for a radical Islamist group that has plotted large-scale attacks in capital cities to further its aim of striking fear into the heart of Western 'crusaders,' the association is as obscure as it is an obvious choice for ISIS to target.
The group's cyber-wing has initiated a trend of hacking low-level sites and databases, releasing civilian details in longer lists with increasing frequency. It had previously released the details of military, governmental or diplomatic personnel. It is a key tenet of the group's amateurish cyber strategy of damaging Western interests and affecting civilians in areas of the Western world that the group is unable to reach.
ISIS publishes the lists and calls upon its supporters, more lone wolves than organized cells, to target those named in the list's home country. In the instance of the New York hit list, the NYPD or the FBI visited members to notify them and offer security advice.
But this latest hit list has left security services and members of this particular database breach unmoved. The group's limited success on the battlefield in its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria is being reflected in cyberspace. The Arkansas State Police is not working on the case and is leaving the follow-up to the Arkansas Library Association.
Bill Sadler, spokesperson for the Arkansas State Police, tells Newsweek : 'All I can tell you is that the Arkansas State Police is aware of the breach of the server. The Arkansas police does not have an open investigation and, as far as any notifications, that would be within the purview of the agency who lost the data.'
Instead of visits or direct contact to those on the list, the FBI chose to inform the Arkansas Library Association who would then contact those named. State and federal authorities essentially left the association to its own devices to inform the 800 people of the database hack, according to an email sent to members and obtained by Newsweek. No security advice was offered to the members of the association by the FBI nor the association itself.
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