14 DAY TRIAL // Intsights, an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm, has told local media that it uncovered plans for future ISIS attacks after hacking into an ISIS forum the group had used in the past to plan other attacks.
The company has told Israeli TV station Channel 10 that it uncovered a forum on the Dark Web, hosted through the Telegram service, where ISIS members were posting content related to upcoming attacks.
The channel included a list of past, confirmed ISIS attacks, such as the one that took place in a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy, northern France, where two ISIS members yielding knives killed an 85-year-old Catholic priest.
ISIS planning attacks on US military bases
The security vendor says that ISIS members are now planning a series of attacks on US military bases.
A map of US military bases from around the world was shared on the forum, and Intsights says it found plans to attack select locations in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. These bases were chosen because the US and its allies had used them to launch air strikes on ISIS militants in both Syria and Iraq.
The same map, shared this past Monday, contained the locations of Israeli military bases as well.
Hacking ISIS, a pastime for hacktivists and security researchers
Intsights, a company run by former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officers, has not said how it hacked the ISIS forum, but this is not something out of the ordinary.
Various hacktivists, mostly Anonymous members, have hacked and dumped data from ISIS forums in the past but have been ignored by mainstream media most of the time. One of them is a hacker named Rebirth, with whom Softpedia spoke last month.
This is the second time this week when security researchers announce they managed to hack Telegram in some way or form.
While there are no technical details on how Insights managed to go around Telegram's encryption and read the data on the forum, two other security researchers are scheduled to give a presentation today at the Black Hat security conference.
The two will reveal their findings on how an Iranian cyber-espionage group managed to collect data on 15 million Iranian citizens from Telegram profiles, even managing to hack two dozen accounts.
