UK government caught running ISIS Twitter accounts

Thursday, January 07, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Twitter accounts, ISIS, UK government

---

(NaturalNews) Americans are rightfully concerned that jihadis from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are already on U.S. soil, but apparently we're not the only Western nation with an ISIS problem. Britain, it seems, has one as well.

As reported by the UK's Mirror, hackers have made the claim that several IS supporters' social media accounts are actually being operated via Internet addresses linked to a government agency – the Department of Works and Pensions.

Four young computer experts who call themselves VandaSec, have found evidence linking at least three accounts whose owners support the Islamic State back to the department.

The Mirror reported further:

"Every computer and mobile phone logs onto the internet using an IP address, which is a type of identification number.

"The hacking collective showed Mirror Online details of the IP addresses used by a trio of separate digital jihadis to access Twitter accounts, which have been used to spread extremist propaganda.

"At first glance, the IP addresses seem to be based in Saudi Arabia, but upon further inspection using specialist tools they appeared to link back to the DWP."

'We can't control how they're used'

"Don't you think that's strange?" one of the members of the hacking collective asked the news site. "We traced these accounts back to London, the home of the British intelligence services."

The group's findings have led to rumors, including a suggestion that perhaps someone inside the government pension agency is running the ISIS-supporting accounts, or that they were developed by British intelligence services as a honeypot to catch wannabe terrorists.

But, when the news site traced the IP addresses that the hacking collective provided, reporters found that they were actually pointing to a series of unpublicized transactions between Britain and Saudi Arabia.

"We learned that the British government sold on a large number of IP addresses to two Saudi Arabian firms," the website reported. "After the sale completed in October of this year, they were used by extremists to spread their message of hate."

Cyber-expert Jamie Turner, from the firm PCA Predict, learned of the sale of those IP addresses, and as a result also uncovered the fact that a large number of them had been transferred to Saudi Arabia in October. He told the Mirror that the IP addresses could most likely still be traced back to the government pension agency because address records had yet to be fully updated.

The British government has since owned up to the sale of the IP addresses to a Saudi telecom firm and the Saudi-based Mobile Telecommunications Company earlier in the year, part of a wider effort to rid DWP of a large number of IP addresses. The Cabinet Office also said that London could have no further control over the addresses in terms of how they are used following the sale.

ISIS to shut down Internet?

"The government owns millions of unused IP addresses which we are selling to get a good return for hardworking taxpayers," an official with the Cabinet Office told the Mirror.

"We have sold a number of these addresses to telecoms companies both in the UK and internationally to allow their customers to connect to the Internet," the official, who was not named, continued. "We think carefully about which companies we sell addresses to, but how their customers use this internet connection is beyond our control."

Cyberwar.news reported Dec. 21 that cyber investigators believe that ISIS could at some point attempt to shut down large portions of the Internet.

Cyber security experts discovered that an ISIS app that is commonly used by the organization may have been at the center of a significant hacking effort on the Internet's core operating infrastructure that took place earlier in the month.

The ISIS Amaq Agency app may have been behind a bot that was used to launch a "distributed denial of services," or DDoS attack, on root server names earlier in December, Cyberwar.news reported.

Sources:

Mirror.co.uk

CyberWar.news

Inquisitr.com