ISIS IP Addresses Traced Back To Saudi Arabia and UK Governments

TOPICS:Brandon TurbevilleBritainISIS

December 17, 2015

By Brandon Turbeville

A recent successful hacking of three ISIS supporters’ Twitter accounts has revealed that the source of these accounts is not located in Syria or Iraq but in the UK and Saudi Arabia.

According to a report by the UK Mirror, a group of four hackers known as VandaSec hacked the ISIS accounts and linked them back to the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK. Indeed, according to the hackers, the accounts are being run from Internet addresses that can be traced back to the DWP.
The Mirror reports that VandaSec showed them the IP addresses used by a group of three separate jihadists (digital ones at least) to access their Twitter accounts. What appeared at first to suggest that the IP addresses were based in Saudi Arabia soon revealed that the addresses linked back to the DWP in the UK.

“VandaSec’s work has sparked wild rumours suggesting someone inside the DWP is running ISIS-supporting accounts, or they were created by intelligence services as a honeypot to trap wannabe jihadis,” Jasper Hamill writes.

The Mirror then claims to have traced the IP addresses shown to them by VandaSec and allegedly found that the addresses pointed to “a series of unpublicized transactions between Britain and Saudi Arabia.”

The Mirror reports it has learned that the British government sold a significant number of IP addresses to two Saudi Arabian firms and, after the sale in October, the IP addresses were being used to spread ISIS propaganda. These IP addresses were apparently not the only ones sold to Saudi Arabia in October, however, but little information is available as to how many others were sold and what they are being used for.

But while the sale of the IP addresses might shift the blame from the UK government on the Saudi Arabian government, the question still remains as to how and why the addresses can be traced back to the DWP.

Some argue that the addresses can be traced back to the UK because the address records had not been fully updated yet. The UK Cabinet Office has officially admitted to selling IP addresses to a number of Saudi Telecom and Mobile Telecommunications Company (based in Saudi Arabia) earlier this year. Still, the question of why the Twitter accounts bear a bit more explanation, at least officially, as to why they can be traced back to Britain.

Regardless, the fact that these Twitter accounts are active in Saudi Arabia and are operating with scant regard for any possibility of being discovered and punished is telling enough. Also, the fact that Twitter, generally cooperative with national governments, has yet to eliminate them should serve as an example to many that both the West and certainly the GCC are entirely uninterested in truly eliminating ISIS as a terrorist organization. Instead, the goal is clearly to continue to use it as a proxy army against non-cooperative governments and non-compliant populations the world over.
As Kerry-Anne Mendoza wrote for The Canary,

So what we have here is ever-increasing overreach by the government; a government who continually erode our civil liberties and right to privacy in the name of security, while applying such minimal measures to their own practices that they sold their own IP addresses to ISIS.

While Americans and the Western world are being relentlessly hammered with propaganda describing ISIS as the greatest threat to humanity justifying polices and surveillance states, it must be asked how members of the most notorious terrorist organization in the world can freely tweet and propagandize using social media linked to the UK.

http://www.activistpost.com/2015/12/isis-ip-addresses-traced-back-to-saudi-arabia-and-uk-governments.html