Abstract:
Our talk will cover several aspects of how terrorist groups, particularly ISIS, have integrated social media and messaging platforms into their recruitment and propaganda campaigns. The adaptation of which has enabled easier and cheaper dissemination of extremist material on a global scale. Our research focuses on understanding how ISIS use Twitter, the potential intelligence gold mine this creates and the overall negative impact of an easily accessible extremist echo chamber. Our secondary area of interest is the use of end-to-end encrypted communications by ISIS, we discuss the technical and political aspects of cryptography bans or backdoors. Overall we aim to summarize the successes and failures encountered by terrorists while adapting their organizations to rely heavily on the internet. As our research relies exclusively on open source intelligence (OSINT) we will conclude by briefly covering our methods, successes, failures and what we learned from it all.

Bio:
We are both undergraduates studying BSc Ethical Hacking at Abertay, Scotland. We were introduced to open source intelligence via our degree and have longstanding independent interest in studying terrorism, the combination of which lead us to this research. We are both active on Twitter as @bowesky and @mikeyjck.

Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2016 at 8:07 PM in talks | rss feed for comments| Both comments and pings are currently closed.