U.S. military Twitter feed hacked, apparently by IS sympathizers

British hacker linked to attack on Pentagon Twitter feed: sources By Mark Hosenball WASHINGTON Tue Jan 13, 2015 7:27pm EST Share this Email Print A computer screenshot shows the U.S. Central Command Twitter feed after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be Islamic State sympathizers January 12, 2015. REUTERS/Staff A computer screenshot shows the U.S. Central Command Twitter feed after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be Islamic State sympathizers January 12, 2015. Credit: Reuters/Staff Related News Obama seeks enhanced cybersecurity laws to fight hackers Apparent Islamic State backers hack U.S. military Twitter feed FBI investigating hack of U.S. Central Command's social media accounts U.S. Central Command's YouTube, Twitter accounts suspended: Pentagon U.S. intelligence agency joins Twitter, hours before military account hacked Analysis & Opinion World’s cartoonists respond to the attack on ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Review: Fixing the CIA – a novel approach Related Topics Tech » Twitter » (Reuters) - The "CyberCaliphate" hacking group that attacked a Twitter account belonging to the Pentagon on Monday was founded by a Briton who was once jailed for hacking the personal address book of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to government sources and private sector security experts. U.S. and European government sources said investigators strongly believe that Junaid Hussain, 20, was the leader of CyberCaliphate, though they do not know if he was personally involved in hacking the Twitter (TWTR.N) and YouTube (GOOGL.O) accounts of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East. Hussain could not be reached for comment. In 2012, Hussain was jailed for six months for stealing Blair's address book from an email account maintained by one of Blair's advisors. Hussain pleaded guilty to putting details of the address book online and making hoax calls to a counter-terrorism hotline. Hussain, who lived in Birmingham, England, moved to Syria sometime in the last two years, according to British media reports. U.S. and European investigators said they are investigating whether Monday's attack on the U.S. Central Command's Twitter and YouTube accounts was launched from Syria, though they have not finished examining the technical evidence. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity. Pentagon spokesman Army Colonel Steve Warren has called the cyberattack "inconvenient" but stressed that no sensitive or classified information was compromised by the hackers, who claimed to be sympathetic toward the Islamic State militant group being targeted in American bombing raids. Investigators believe that Hussain was the main individual behind a Twitter account that operated under the pseudonym Abu Hussain al Britani, according to the sources. That account was linked to CyberCaliphate after the group last week claimed responsibility for hacking the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico and WBOC, a Delaware television station. Neither the Albuquerque Journal nor WBOC responded to requests for comment. The Abu Hussain al Britani account has been suspended as of Tuesday. One of the government sources said it was possible that other people besides Hussain used that account. Alex Kassirer, an analyst with Flashpoint Global Partners, said Hussain led efforts by Islamic State to recruit "hackers for a CyberCaliphate." Flashpoint Global Partners is a private company that monitors extremist Internet postings for government agencies and private clients. She said the CyberCaliphate first surfaced when it published a "recruitment announcement" on Sept. 11, 2014. According to Kassirer, Hussain's British wife said on her Twitter account last week that her husband had been killed in a drone attack. U.S. and European security officials said there was no confirmation that Hussain was dead (Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by Tiffany Wu) ======== Chechen leader blasts Europe over double standards on terrorism Published time: January 12, 2015 10:14 Edited time: January 12, 2015 19:13 Get short URL Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov (RIA Novosti/Said Tsarnaev) Charlie Hebdo attack & fallout Tags Chechnya, EU, France, Kadyrov, Politics, Russia, Terrorism The unprecedented public response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings in France could be organized by those who want to stir anti-Islamic sentiment and distract people from other problems, claims the leader of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov. The head of the Chechen Republic explained his position through his longtime medium of choice – the Instagram photo sharing service. In an extensive post accompanying a picture of himself Kadyrov said that he welcomed the “single-hearted” denouncing of terrorism by world leaders as well as the millions of people taking part in demonstrations in Paris. He also condemned the killing of unarmed people by terrorists and considered the fight against terrorism the most important task in his life. At the same time Kadyrov posed a question. Was the denouncing aimed at terrorism only in France or were the public figures and people targeting the evil all over the World? “Why the presidents, kings and prime ministers have never led marches of protest against the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Yemenis, and Iraqis? Why did they remain silent when terrorists exploded a bomb in the Chechen government HQ or when they blew up the Grozny stadium killing Chechen President Akhmad-Haji Kadyrov [Ramzan Kadyrov’s father] and his aides? Why did they not react to the raid on the school in Beslan and the hostage taking at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater? Why keep silent when in December last year terrorists captured the House of Press and a school in Grozny, killing and injuring over 50 people?” Kadyrov writes in his latest address. “It is impossible to secure Paris, London, Madrid and other European capitals if the whole society fails to condemn those who raise and sponsor terrorists all over the world masking it as support for opposition movements,” Kadyrov stated. The Chechen strongman wrote that he suspected some powerful forces of preparing the whole scenario in order to incite an anti-Islamic mood in Europe or to distract public attention from some brewing global problem. A fervent believer in Islam, Kadyrov also wrote that he and his allies would not allow anyone to insult the Prophet, even if this would cost them their lives. “If we are still silent this does not mean that we cannot get millions of people onto the streets all over the world protesting against those who connive at the insults to Muslims’ religious feelings. Is this what you want?” he stated, apparently addressing the political leaders of the Western world. The head of the Chechen republic also suggested the mass media had “allowed themselves to get involved in the scandal,” and should apologize to Muslims to end the controversy. “Peace and stability are more important for all peoples than the right of a handful of journalists to disrespect the Prophet,” he wrote. =============== Mon, Jan 12 17:19 PM EST image By David Alexander and Jim Finkle (Reuters) - The Twitter and YouTube accounts for the U.S. military command that oversees operations in the Middle East were hacked on Monday by people claiming to be sympathetic toward the Islamic State militant group being targeted in American bombing raids. U.S. officials acknowledged that the incident was embarrassing but sought to downplay its importance. Pentagon spokesman Army Colonel Steve Warren said the Defense Department "views this as little more than a prank, or as vandalism." "It's inconvenient, it's an annoyance but in no way is any sensitive or classified information compromised," Warren told a press briefing. U.S. officials said the U.S. Central Command Twitter account and its YouTube account were suspended after being compromised. The White House said it was monitoring the extent of the hacking incident. Two U.S. defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the hacking was an embarrassment but that the images posted by the hackers did not appear to include classified information or pose a security threat. "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, the CyberCaliphate continues its CyberJihad," the Central Command Twitter feed said after being hacked. The Twitter feed had several messages from hackers, including one telling American soldiers to "watch your back," and the YouTube account had two videos that appeared to be linked to Islamic State. Islamic State has taken control of parts of Syria and Iraq. The group's forces have been targeted in ongoing air strikes by the United States and international partners. The Twitter account published a list of generals and addresses associated with them, titled "Army General Officer Public Roster (by rank) 2 January 2014." Subsequent posts read, "Pentagon Networks Hacked! China Scenarios" and "Pentagon Networks Hacked. Korean Scenarios." "We can confirm that the CENTCOM Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised earlier today. We are taking appropriate measures to address the matter," Central Command said in a statement. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said during a press briefing that the hacking was "something that we take seriously." Earnest seemed to downplay the impact of the incident, saying, "There's a pretty significant difference between what is a large data breach and the hacking of a Twitter account." President Barack Obama separately on Monday announced new proposals aimed at bolstering American cybersecurity in the wake of recent high-profile hacking incidents including one against Sony Pictures Entertainment that U.S. officials have blamed on North Korea. While it was not clear that any Pentagon network had been compromised, it did appear that the hackers were successful in temporarily gaining control of Central Command’s Twitter feed, which is controlled through a password. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, Republican Michael McCaul of Texas, called the incident "severely disturbing." "Assaults from cyber-jihadists will become more common unless the administration develops a strategy for appropriately responding to these cyberattacks, including those like the North Korea attack against Sony," McCaul said. REVIEW OF DOCUMENTS Reuters reviewed some of the documents released by the hackers but could not immediately identify any that appeared to contain information that compromised national security. Some could easily be found using Google searches, including the U.S. Department of Defense’s “Estimated Impacts of Sequestration-Level Funding,” which is available on a public government website. Another budget document, “Program Acquisition Cost by Weapon System” is a March 2014 document available on the website of the defense department’s comptroller. Another is a draft version of the 2015 appropriations bill for the Defense Department. After the hacking, the heading of the Central Command Twitter account showed a figure in a black-and-white headscarf and the words "CyberCaliphate" and "I love you ISIS," using an acronym for Islamic State. Central Command's YouTube account featured videos posted by the U.S. military of air strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq. It apparently was hacked to add two videos titled "Flames of War ISIS Video" and "O Soldiers of Truth Go Forth." Several private researchers said such incidents are fairly common. "While this will probably be described as ‘sophisticated,’ it's really not that difficult to gain access to someone else’s social media or email account," said Michael Smith, chief operating officer of Kronos Advisory, a private intelligence group focused on counterterrorism. In what proved to be a bit of bad timing, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center chose earlier on Monday to join Twitter for the first time. It made a joke in its first tweet: "Up to 292 followers so far and not hacked yet." Central Command is based at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and handles American military operations covering the Middle East and Central Asia. Central Command oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is managing the U.S. air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Islamic State has attracted followers internationally who support its hard-line Islamist message. One of the men who carried out the deadly attacks in Paris last week had declared his allegiance to Islamic State. (Reporting by Ryan McNeill, Phil Stewart, Andrea Shalal, Roberta Rampton, Doina Chiacu and David Brunnstrom; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Grant McCool and Toni Reinhold) ======================= Islamic State kills 24 Kurds in surprise attack in North Iraq Sun, Jan 11 07:21 AM EST ARBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Islamic State militants have killed at least 24 members of the Kurdish security forces in a surprise attack in northern Iraq, Kurdish officials said, in one of the deadliest single battles for the Kurds since last summer. Three Kurdish officers reported continued clashes with Islamic State on Sunday, one day after the deaths, near Gwer, a town some 40km (25 miles) southwest of the autonomous Kurdish region's capital Arbil. Kurdish-controlled Gwer is likely to be a launch-pad for any future attempt by Iraqi and Kurdish forces to retake Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq which Islamic State seized last June. Islamic State militants crossed the river Zab in small boats on Friday night and entered Gwer, but were driven back by Kurdish peshmerga forces, the officers said. "We've been engaged in fighting with them for the past two days," said one senior Kurdish officer on the Gwer frontline as the sound of gunfire rattled in the background. The officer, who asked to remain anonymous, said around 60 militants in total had been killed and that by intercepting the frequency they used to communicate via walkie-talkie and listening in, it appeared many more were injured. Both he and another officer blamed the Iraqi army for allowing the militants to reach Gwer. They accused Iraqi soldiers of abandoning a forward position when they came under attack, leaving the town exposed. REFINERY UNDER ATTACK The peshmerga launched a ground offensive to drive IS militants out of the Gwer area in late December, retaking several villages with the help of coalition airstrikes. Islamic State said on Friday it had launched a counter-attack against the peshmerga with a range of weapons including TOW missiles and rockets, killing dozens, including a senior officer. More than 750 peshmerga have been killed in combat since Islamic State overran their defenses in northern Iraq last summer, prompting the first airstrikes by the United States. The Kurds have now regained most of the ground they lost in August. However, peshmerga commanders complain they remain ill-equipped compared with the militants, who plundered Iraqi arms depots when they overran Mosul in June. Elsewhere, Islamic State fighters attacked the refinery of Baiji in northern Iraq on Sunday, a security officer said. Twenty mortar rounds were fired at the refinery, followed by a car bomb and three hours of fighting before the militants retreated, he said. Baghdad's forces and Islamic State have battled since June for control of the refinery and its neighboring town. (Isabel Coles, Additional reporting by Saif Hameed; Editing by Ned Parker and Gareth Jones)

Qatari Foreign Policy and the Changing Regional Order in the Middle East

Qatar: The same country that hosts CENTCOM also hosts an Islamist cleric who called for the killing of American soldiers in Iraq. Qatari Foreign Policy and the Changing Regional Order in the Middle East LSE IDEAS KUWAIT PROGRAMME AND LSE MIDDLE EAST CENTRE PUBLIC SEMINAR Wednesday 26 February 2014, 16:30 - 18:00, CLM 2.02, Clement House, LSESpeaker: Dr Lina Khatib. Chair: Professor Toby Dodge Qatar has established a reputation for adopting a foreign policy based on pragmatism. However, the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East has recently witnessed a number of key changes that are recalibrating the distribution of power in the region. Are those changes testing Qatar's pragmatism? Is the Middle East witnessing the birth of a new political order? Audio podcast Speaker Dr Lina Khatib is Director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. Previously, she was the co-founding head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Chair Professor Toby Dodge is Director of the LSE Middle East Centre, Deputy Director of IDEAS and a Reader in the International Relations Department at LSE. Location CLM 2.02, Second floor, Clement House, LSE map| ============================================= The Country That Makes Saudi Arabia Look Good 15 Mar 12, 2014 10:35 AM ET By Jeffrey Goldberg Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, met secretly in Kuwait last month with foreign ministers from five neighboring countries, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. According to two people with direct knowledge of this meeting, the five foreign ministers had a simple message for the emir: Cut it out -- we know what you’re doing. Qatar is a tiny country -- a mole on the back of Saudi Arabia -- yet one that makes its presence felt in disproportionate and often destructive ways. It hosts the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command, but also provides material support to the Muslim Brotherhood, to Hamas (the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood), and to radical Sunni outfits in Syria, among others. After the new emir took over the management of Qatar last June from his father (Qatar, like other Gulf states, is a privately held family business), there was some hope that he would cease Qatar’s meddling in the region’s various wars and insurrections and focus on such domestic concerns as his family’s pharaonic building campaign in advance of the 2022 World Cup. (I describe this construction campaign as pharaonic not because it is resulting in grand and beautiful buildings but because so many oppressed foreign workers are dying in the course of building those buildings.) After a few encouraging signals, the Qataris have returned to form, and even expanded their portfolio of meddling in regional uprisings, providing support to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels. The support for the Houthis was too much for Saudi Arabia, which engineered the ultimatum delivered last month. The reaction of the emir was predictable: He denied everything, according to my sources. Qatar is not supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, not supporting the al-Qaeda-influenced Nusra Front in Syria and not supporting the Houthis. The foreign ministers provided the emir with direct evidence, but the denials continued until the meeting broke up. After this meeting, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the U.A.E. all recalled their ambassadors from Qatar, commencing a new stage in this Gulf cold war. Qatar has shown no sign that it is willing to stop its support for radical groups; no sign that it will stop using its television network, Al Jazeera, to cause problems for its neighbors (while scrupulously avoiding criticizing Qatar itself, of course); and no sign that it will prevent the region’s most important Sunni cleric, the radical and radically dyspeptic Yusuf al-Qaradawi, from using Qatar as a base to foment outrage on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere. Qatar has achieved something remarkable, in my book, at least: It has made me relatively sympathetic to the Saudi regime. (Please, if you don’t mind, focus on that “relatively.”) The Saudis, for their many, many faults (ranging from their abhorrence of democracy to their abhorrence of women), have in place a foreign policy that is far more mature than that of Qatar. The fight between Qatar and Saudi Arabia (and its allies) is in many ways a proxy battle over the future of Egypt. Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. see the vanquishing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the re-emergence of Egypt as the linchpin in the moderate Sunni alliance battling Iran, as existentially important. This has led them to support the various excesses of the military junta currently ruling Egypt, including the cruel jailing of Al Jazeera journalists. But it also leads them to call out Qatar for its obvious hypocrisies and double-standards, such as providing Qaradawi, who is an extremist’s extremist, with a megaphone for his views. (Qaradawi represents a breathtaking example of Qatar’s hypocrisy: The same country that hosts U.S. Central Command also hosts an Islamist cleric who called for the killing of American soldiers in Iraq.) Qatar is very rich, but its money has not helped it integrate into the international order in a clever or foresighted way. Unlike the U.A.E., the Gulf country that is the most open culturally and economically, and the one with the most straightforward and constructive politics, Qatar believes that it can play all sides of any conflict and stonewall when it’s found out. The message of the meeting in Kuwait is that Qatar's neighbors are no longer going to play by the rules it tried to establish. The Saudis, and their friends, have decided that the stakes are too high: A resurgent Iran; a U.S. ally that is slowly withdrawing from the Middle East; and a chance to put away for good an organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, that threatens their existence, have conspired to make life just a bit more difficult for the new emir than it was for his father. To contact the writer of this article: Jeffrey Goldberg at jgoldberg50@bloomberg.net. To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.