Computer hack helped feed an Islamic State death list

The attack seemed like a garden-variety digital holdup.

A computer intruder, calling himself the “Albanian hacker,” left a message for the administrator of a website for an Illinois internet retailer: Pay two Bitcoins, or about $500 at the time, and the intruder would “remove all bugs on your shop!”

Such demands are typical among underground hackers who infect computers with malicious code and seize control of them, freeing them only after receiving a payment.

But this case was more than a surreptitious digital mugging. The trespasser had ties to the Islamic State Hacking Division, a terrorist cyber unit, and before it was over he’d put together a “kill list” for the Islamic State with the identities of 1,351 U.S. government and military personnel from the 100,000 names, credit card records and Social Security numbers he’d extracted from the host server.

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But Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counter-terrorism expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said U.S. government cyber experts are “orders of magnitude better” than Islamic State-linked hackers.

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