“The Digital Threat of ISIS & the War in Syria”

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (often referred to as ISIS, ISIL, or The Islamic State) is becoming increasingly technically sophisticated in the way they target their adversaries. In late November 2014, a Syrian activist group running the non-violent campaign “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently,” which documents ISIS’s human rights abuses in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, received an anonymous email containing advanced malware. The group reported the malware to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which subsequently published a report linking the malware attack to ISIS. This was the first known digital attack perpetrated by the group against civil society in Syria, and there have been many more attacks since then.