British intelligence & military chiefs have revealed details of an operation to weaken terrorist group Isis in 2016-2017.
The UK military and security agencies launched an operation to weaken Isis strongholds such as Raqqa, in Syria in the 2016-17 period it appears.
Isis Ideology
A secret UK cyber operation to undermine Isis ideology and weaken its fighters on the battlefield involved disabling drones, jamming phones & targeting servers to block online propaganda, explained military & security chiefs.
The revelations from Jeremy Fleming, Director of the signals-intelligence agency GCHQ, & General Sir Patrick Sanders, Head of UK Strategic Command, come just 2 months after PM Boris Johnson announced the creation of a “cyber force” run jointly by the military & spy agencies to fight adversaries in the digital sphere.
Single Combined Unit
This team, which is expected to grow from a few 100 personnel to 3,000 over the next 10 years, will bring together Britain’s offensive cyber capabilities within a single combined unit.
Discussing the 2016-2017 Isis operation on a Sky News podcast, “Into the Grey Zone”, Fleming & Patrick commented that it became clear that Islamist militants relied on cyber technology for propaganda, command & control, & attack planning. At that time, Isis was recruiting fighters as it wished to establish a ‘caliphate’ across large parts of Iraq & Syria. “It was a very cheap & effective way of waging a terrorist warfare,” Sanders explained.
Vulnerability
“What we wanted to do was to turn that strength, that dependence that they had on the cyber into a vulnerability, & also to undermine the credibility of their information campaign & of their ideology.”
GCHQ first admitted 3 years ago that it had launched a big “offensive cyber campaign” against Isis but has not given any details before. While the UK & allies, e.g., the US, have admitted using offensive cyber tools, the specifics of their attack capabilities are highly classified.
Adversaries, e.g., Russia, China, North Korea & Iran have more than shown their willingness to use these methods. Fleming observed the joint military & GCHQ team had “disrupted the communication of the Daesh (Isis) fighters on the battlefield” & piloted new technology to undermine Isis drone technology.
Extremist Propaganda
He also stated that the UK had sought to stop the flow of extremist propaganda by “remotely getting to Isis servers, getting to the places that they stored their material”.
“We wanted to ensure that when they tried to co-ordinate attacks on our forces, their devices didn’t work, that they couldn’t trust the orders that were coming to them from their seniors,” Sanders added.
“We wanted to deceive them & to misdirect them, to make them less effective, less cohesive & sap their morale.” GCHQ’s cyber tactics were reinforced on the ground by separate military operations involving special forces, the Iraqi military & local resistance groups, although details of these have not been made public.
Shadowy & Unaccountable
While joint cyber operations are already used in modern warfare, some warn such activities that fall below the threshold of formal conflict risk being ‘shadowy & unaccountable.’
Emily Taylor, an expert in cyber & international security at the Chatham House think-tank, agreed that countries had to walk an “ethical tightrope” to ensure powerful cyber weapons were being used appropriately & with proper oversight, even on the most classified of operations.
Deferential Attitude
“One of the biggest risks that I see is that cyber operations are a very technical area & we have a huge respect in this country for our intelligence services – so there can be either a deferential attitude from the people giving oversight or even worse, just an ignorance & inability to hold people to account,” she concluded.
https://www.cybernewsgroup.co.uk/virtual-conference-march-2021/
