Taliban Hacked, DoD Starts Cyber Offensive?

This was written by Michael W. Cheek on Monday, June 14, 2010, 9:12.

The webmaster of a Taliban-endorsed website has claimed that the website was hacked. Abu al-Aina’a al-Khorasani, an administrator for a jihadi forum endorsed by the Taliban wrote in a  post that “group’s main site and the site of its online journal Al-Sumud, have been the subject of an ‘infiltration operation,’” according to Wired.com.

The post goes on to warn online jihadists “to not enter any of the links that concern these websites, and not even to surf [the content] until you receive the confirmed news by your brothers, Allah-willing.”

Outages of jihadist websites are relatively common, though this may be the first example on a website being hacked, Evan Kohlmann of Flashpoint Partners told Wired.

“The official Afghan Taliban website has, of course, routinely been knocked offline and disabled by cyber vigilantes and other culprits, but this would be the first instance that I’m aware of it being actually ‘infiltrated,’” he said. “It’s an unsettling prospect for security-minded online jihadists, because such sites can be manipulated by a variety of hostile parties in order to harvest a breathtaking amount of personal data on regular visitors.”

While no one has claimed credit for the hack, the Department of Defense has previously announced its intentions to take-down terrorist affiliated websites.