14 DAY TRIAL // US Department of Justice officials have announced today that Ardit Ferizi, 20, of Kosovo, pleaded guilty to charges of stealing data from a US company and providing personal data on US military personnel to ISIS members.
Ferizi, known online as Th3Dir3ctorY, was one of the key members of the Kosova Hacker's Security (KHS) crew that terrorized governments and companies across the Balkans in the early 2010s.
Ferizi has a prodigious hacking career
The group, in which Ferizi played a crucial role, is responsible for hacking and defacing government targets such as the Presidency of Macedonia, the Greek Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace (DAMT), and the Greek Ministry of Education, Lifelong Learning and Religion.
On top of these and countless other website defacements, the group also breached the servers of IBM and Greek mobile telecoms firm OTE, from where they stole data.
Ferizi's tenure with KHS ended when he went to study computer science in Kuala Lumpur, after which KHS activity also died down.
The hacker resurfaced on the grid in the summer of 2015, when he hacked the network of a US retailer from where he stole the personal details of countless customers.
Ferizi gave ISIS details of 1,351 military members
There are no details on how ISIS befriended Ferizi and what happened, but the hacker forged a partnership with Junaid Hussain, at that time the leader of the Islamic State Hacking Division (ISHD).
Ferizi filtered the information from the US retailer and provided Hussain with the personal details of 1,351 US military personnel. The ISIS member then leaked this data on Twitter, urging fellow members located in the US to kill the listed targets in "lone wolf" attacks. Some of Hussain's statements included:
“ We are in your emails and computer systems, watching and recording your every move, we have your names and addresses, we are in your emails and social media accounts, we are extracting confidential data and passing on your personal information to the soldiers of the khilafah, who soon with the permission of Allah will strike at your necks in your own lands! ”
On September 15, 2015, Malaysian authorities arrested Ferizi at the Kuala Lumpur airport while he was trying to return to Kosovo. The hacker was later extradited to the US, where authorities charged him at the end of January.The hacker has now pleaded guilty to all charges and will be awaiting his sentencing, scheduled for September 16, 2016. Ferizi faces up to 20 years in prison for aiding a terrorist group and an additional five years for the US retailer data breach.