The hacker group Anonymous has issued a warning about several planned attacks by Islamic State in several countries set for Sunday.
Anonymous, the loose collective of online activists, said Saturday it has uncovered information about Islamic State group attacks in Paris as well as at locations in the U.S., Indonesia, Italy and Lebanon, all apparently set for Sunday. OpParisIntel, a group within Anonymous, released a statement saying it had collected information about imminent attacks by the militant group — aka Daesh, ISIL and ISIS — in the French capital a little more than a week after a series of coordinated attacks there left 130 dead and hundreds injured.
Anonymous also said the Islamic State group is planning an assault at the WWE Survivor Series event scheduled to take place in the Philips Arena in Atlanta Sunday at 7.30 p.m. EST, as well as attacks at multiple events in Paris.
The collective published the list of potential targets alongside a statement: “The goal is to make sure the whole world, or at least the people going to these events, know that there have been threats and that there is possibility of an attack to happen. Another goal is to make sure Daesh knows that the world knows and cancels the attacks, which will disorientate them for a while.”
The targets listed by Anonymous are as follow:
Cigales Electroniques with Vocodecks, RE-Play & Rawtor at Le Bizen (Paris)
Concrete Invites Drumcode: Adam Beyer, Alan Fitzpatrick, Joel Mull at Concrete (Paris)
Demonstration by Collectif du Droit des Femmes (Paris)
Feast of Christ the King celebrations (Rome/Worldwide)
Al-Jihad, One Day One Juz (Indonesia)
Five Finger Death Punch (Milan)
University Pastoral Day (Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Lebanon)
According to Anonymous: “We only appeared now because our goal was to remain undercover and report everything to the right authorities and let them take all the action. But when authorities do not take action, Anonymous does. This part of the op started last Monday and has [been] and will be active 24 hours a day as long as the op is going on.”
The hackers say they have informed the MI5 intelligence agency in the U.K., the CIA and FBI in the U.S., and the Australian government, but refuse to release the proof they were able to get.
At this point, I would suspect anything unearthed by Anonymous that they claim to have gotten from ISIS to be bogus, not because they are low-life scum but because ISIS could be playing them. Anonymous made a grandiose announcement that they were going to target Islamic State and “bring them down.” It would be just like the terrorists to leave a series of bread crumbs for the hackers to follow that turned out to be disinformation. ISIS wins this just because they end up getting everybody scared for no reason while making the hackers look like fools.
Then again, Anonymous may just have headed off a series of terrorist attacks. I guess we’ll never know.
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