Former hacker: Anonymous’ efforts to sabotage ISIS might do more harm than good

They call themselves Anonymous and they say they can take down ISIS.

Anonymous is mysterious vigilante hacker group whose calling card is a black and white Guy Fawkes mask, and this recorded message: “We do not forgive, we do not forget. Expect us.”

They have now declared cyber war on ISIS, vowing to hunt the terrorists down. But can they really?

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Corey Nachreiner is Chief Tech Officer at WatchGuard Technologies and he knows something about this, having been a white hat hacker himself back in the day. He says it sounds like they’re planning a document attack, or what’s called a “doxing” operation.

“Doxing is using various techniques to find the real name associated with a particular target,” he explains.

That would be good.

“But I’m … the thing with Anonymous is I’m always nervous about this vigilante justice type of stuff because they don’t pay as much attention to detail as the authorities and sometimes show the wrong people and cause more trouble than their activities are worth.”

And so, despite all the super secret cyber voodoo going on, and as much as he’d like to see ISIS websites sabotaged, Corey says sometimes it just takes plain old police work.

“To pay attention to money trails. To pay attention to explosive-creating material,” he says. “Those methods will catch terrorists much more than just trying to see if you could sniff every different type of traffic out there.”

After all we broke both the secret Japanese and German codes in World War II, but we still had to send the troops in.