Al-Qaeda sites fell victim to hackers

Al-Qaeda propaganda sites may have been subjected to systematic hacker attacks, the newspaper The Guardian reports (full translation at Inopressa.ru ). According to the columnist of the IEN Black publication, the sites Al-Ekhlas, Al-Buraq and Al-Firdaws interrupted the work on the eve of September 11 and are still inaccessible.

However, the newspaper claims, there is reason to suspect that a targeted sabotage campaign occurs, since the fourth site, Al-Hesbah, continues to work without failures. Several experts concluded that Saudi intelligence may use the surviving site to monitor the jihadists and lure them into traps.

All four sites were posted by the materials produced by AS-SAHAB, the al-Qaeda media unit, mainly video recordings of “Martyr operations” in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries-as well as the appeals of Usama Ben Laden and Aiman ​​Al-Zavakhiri. To access the site, you usually need to enter a password, and the information has several levels of secrecy-it is easiest to familiarize yourself with the statements of organizations related to al-Qaeda, which operate on the periphery in Uzbekistan or Algeria. There are also closed forums whose participants perform under pseudonymers.

William Mackents, consultant of the West Point Military Academy, believes that the collapse of sites is the so-called “black operation” taken by the United forces of several states-illegal actions, which can be abandoned in case of something. The Egyptian expert Dia Rashwan suggests that the United States decided to close these Internet forums so that al-Qaeda attracts less attention in the Arab world. There is an alternative hypothesis: Mustafa Alani from the Dubai Gulf Research Centre is sure that the sites were collapsed by Shiites that lead the cyberwain with the Sunnis. Another version is that the supporters of Al-Qaeda themselves closed the forums in order to deprive the enemies of a valuable source of information.