14 DAY TRIAL // Ardit Ferizi, the Kosovo citizen suspected to have supplied ISIS' members with information on US servicemen and women, has made his first appearance in a US court this past Wednesday, January 27, as the Washington Post reported.
Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis officially charged Ferizi, 20, with unauthorized access to a computer, aggravated identity theft, and providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist group. If guilty of all crimes, the hacker could face up to 35 years in jail.
Ferizi was a long-time member of KHS
Additionally, further details about Ferizi's true identity also surfaced. It appears that Ferizi was one of the key members of the Kosova Hacker's Security (KHS) hacking crew.
Ferizi, who was the owner of the @Th3Dir3ctorY Twitter handle, had in the past breached and hacked data from thousands of companies and government websites.
Some of his previous targets included government websites belonging to the Presidency of Macedonia, the Greek Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace (DAMT), and the Greek Ministry of Education, Lifelong Learning and Religion.
Besides basic defacements, KHS also stole data from Greek mobile telecoms firm OTE and even IBM.
Ferizi is the real source of a data leak previously attributed to ISIS hackers
After spending some years with the KHS group, Ferizi eventually went to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to study computer science.
It is unknown how ISIS managed to recruit Ferizi, but according to court documents, the hacker breached the server of a US online retailer and stole data on 1,351 US military and government personnel.
Ferizi than transmitted this data to Junaid Hussain, leader of the Islamic State Hacking Division (ISHD). Hussain later posted the information he received from Ferizi online, with encouragements for ISIS lone wolves to hunt down and kill all the listed persons.
A few weeks after Hussain leaked this information online, he was killed in a US drone strike in Syria.
In October 2015, Ferizi was arrested at the Kuala Lumpur airport, while trying to return home to Kosovo.