Their philosophies may be rooted in the ninth century but they do know their computers.
First - from Yahoo/Associated Press:
France sees 19,000 cyberattacks since terror rampage
Hackers have targeted about 19,000 French websites since a rampage by Islamic extremists left 20 dead last week, a top French cyberdefense official said Thursday as the president tried to calm the nation's inflamed religious tensions.
France is on edge since last week's attacks, which began Jan. 7 at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The paper, repeatedly threatened for its caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, buried several of its slain staff members Thursday even as it reprinted another weekly issue with Muhammad on its cover.
Calling it an unprecedented surge, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military, said about 19,000 French websites had faced cyberattacks in recent days, some carried out by well-known Islamic hacker groups.
Second from Quartz:
To avoid detection, terrorists purposely sent emails with spammy subject lines
By now, it’s common knowledge the National Security Agency collects plenty of data on suspected terrorists as well as ordinary citizens. But the agency also has algorithms in place to filter out information that doesn’t need to be collected or stored for further analysis, such as spam emails—a fact terrorists used to their advantage.
Much of the debate around the NSA’s overreach has focused on selectors, the terms it uses to describe its requests for information collected. According to a transparency report it published last summer, the agency was approved to use 423 selectors in 2013 under its telephone metadata program. However, filters, which specify data the agency does not want, also play an important role in reducing noise.
In a paper published by the American Mathematical Society, the agency’s former research director, Michael Wertheimer, recalled an instance when the US seized laptops left by Taliban members soon after the 9/11 attacks. The only email written in English found on the computers contained a purposely spammy subject line: “CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT.” According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants.
“It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed ‘spam’ filters,” he said, noting the agency is constantly refining its algorithms to discover new threats.
The Wertheimer paper is a good and short (three page PDF) read - very clever idea to mask messages. I doubt that the various three-letter-agencies have the manpower to sift through all captured emails. By making it look like spam, there is a good chance that the operator will skip over it...
