A 25-minute video threatening the lives of Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was just discovered by the web company Vocativ and it reveals a chilling image of the two tech leaders with bullet holes attached to their faces.
Apparently, this comes from a group of hackers who identify themselves with the Islamic State militant movement and wanted to send a clear message to the two companies that the war against their propaganda will not be a successful one.
The creators of this video call themselves “sons of the Caliphate army” and in the lengthy clip they appear to be accessing Facebook and Twitter users’ accounts, tampering with their profile pictures and posting ISIS-supporting materials on their websites.
Whether their actions are real or not still remains to be determined, however the implication that people’s accounts from these two social media platforms would be so easily hacked is sure to make some users nervous.
Within the clip the hackers are claiming that even though Facebook and Twitter keep suspending their accounts, this will not deter them from their actions and they will not be intimidated.
The ISIS supporters also brag by saying that Zuckerberg and Dorsey are not in the same league as the movement and that for whatever action they choose to take against them, they will retaliate with much more power.
They go on to say that for every account that Facebook and Twitter decide to close, they will hack 10 more in return and erase the two leaders’ names for good once their sites will crash.
The same grouping claims to have hacked some 150 Facebook groups, 10,000 Facebook user accounts and also 5,000 Twitter accounts, which – according to them – have been offered to supporters.
At the beginning of February, Twitter announced that starting from June 2015 over 125,000 accounts belonging to ISIS activists had been deleted. The account removals were based on human and technological criteria.
In a February 5th statement, Twitter officials publicly announced their disapproval of the Islamic State and highlighted that they will not allow violent terrorism to be conducted on their platform.
Nevertheless, this cyber-war against ISIS is not limited to social media platforms. A hacktivist group called Anonymous are also threatening to shut down the radical movement’s operations and governments are also starting to take action.
In late 2015, George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor, stated that their cyber-security services were working on conducting electronic attacks against the movement, in order to destroy their recruitment networks and communication platforms.
Image Source: NBCBayArea