It is quite ironic that Hizbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, in an interview with Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, said that except for Israel, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, otherwise known as the Islamic State) currently constitutes the most significant threat to stability in the region. Recent achievements by ISIS and the concern it arouses are highly evident in statements by various world leaders, including President Barack Obama, who said last week that the United States did not yet have a strategy for dealing with the organization, and Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, who warned that ISIS would turn its attention first to Europe, and a month later to the US. In truth, however, not much is known about the organization, because it has no centralized control, and its size and command structure, along with the identity of its leaders, are unclear.

Nonetheless, it is already obvious we are only at the beginning of a new fierce war in cyberspace. Indeed, while embodying the evil spirit of fanaticism, the organization’s activity demonstrates the duality between what appears to be primitivism and 21st century cyber warfare. In turn, in a step that aroused much criticism, organizations affiliated with Anonymous announced late last week a full scale cyber war against the Islamic State (Operation Ice ISIS), intended to attack ISIS supporters using social media for propaganda purposes.

Hizbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda, as well as other jihad groups including ISIS, are well aware of the immense power of the social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others) as an effective tool for distributing propaganda and political messages. These and other traditional media join behind the scenes activity designed to promote organizational ideology and recruit new operatives and resources. In contrast to the other groups, however, and as part of the doctrine it has adopted, ISIS resorts openly to a strategic deployment marked by sophisticated exploitation of the social networks on a previously unknown scale. ISIS’s technological expertise evidenced thus far exceeds that of al-Qaeda and other jihad movements. The brutal execution of James Foley by a jihad operative with a British accent is no more graphic than other clips documenting the murder of other captives, e.g., Daniel Pearl. However, the viral dissemination of this clip and others – most recently the beheading of Steven Sotloff – at an unprecedented rate by manipulation of Twitter and Facebook accounts and other applications that can be purchased from Google Store such as Dawn of Glad Tidings distinguishes ISIS from other organizations, and illustrates that another dimension of warfare combining physical and cybernetic jihad has appeared. A good example is that apparent executioner “John of the Beatles,” the leader of a British gang operating in the ISIS framework, is quite possibly Abu Hussain al-Britani, a 20 year-old hacker convicted in 2012 for stealing information from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and suspected of organizing complex cyber attacks against banks in the UK.

ISIS’s main effort to date in cyberspace has focused on psychological warfare by generating fear through flooding the internet with video clips portraying the brutal acts of beheading and mass executions, as well as victory parades, as part of developing deterrence and creating an illusion of force in excess of the organization’s actual strength. The essence of its online activity, however, is broader. It enables its supporters to obtain operational information, including training in preparing explosives and car bombs, and religious rulings legitimizing massacres in regions under ISIS control. In tandem, it distributes indoctrination materials, such as a maagzine called Dabiq: The Return of Khilafah, which focuses mainly on topics relating to formation of the new Islamic state headed by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. However, ISIS’s technological expertise is not the only factor. Perhaps the public, which is revolted by the organization’s deeds but closely follows these clips and photos as a kind of reality show, is contributing a great deal to the organization’s popularity.

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