Islamic State operates a 24-hour help desk to train terrorists

WE ALREADY know they are adept at using social media to recruit jihadists. Now it has emerged they’ve set up a 24-hour help desk to train them.

Islamic State’s 24-hour hotline

IT HAS Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, online magazines and even an app, now it has emerged IS have another tool to assist in its global campaign of terror — a 24-hour help desk.

As France and its allies try to piece together how eight jihadists managed to launch the orchestrated attacks on Paris last week, it now appears the militant group has a around-the-clock propaganda hotline.

And its main purpose — to train terrorists.

The Jihadi Help Desk is supposedly manned by five to six senior Islamic State operatives whose main role is to help its recruits avoid detection by intelligence authorities.

Aaron Brantly, a counter-terrorism analyst at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research organisation at the US Military Academy, told NBC News the help desk assists would-be jihadists by training them to use encrypted communications platforms in order to evade detection.

“They’ve developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning,” he said. “They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror.

“Clearly this enables them to communicate and engage in operations beyond what used to happen, and in a much more expeditious manner. They are now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications.”

One of the theories that was floated about in the wake of the Paris attacks was that the terrorists may have used Sony PlayStation 4 to communicate with each other.

There were unconfirmed reports that one of the gaming consoles was seized from a house in Brussels following a raid.

Jan Jambon, Belgium’s federal home affairs minister, said at a Politico event days before the attacks that it was incredibly difficult to monitor communications from the console, The Hill reported.

“The most difficult communication between these terrorists is via PlayStation 4,” Mr Jambon said. “It’s very, very difficult for our services — not only Belgian services but international services — to decrypt the communication that is done via PlayStation 4.

“PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp.”

WhatsApp is a popular instant messaging app that encrypts communications.

It also emerged this week that IS were using Telegram, an encrypted messaging app to swap ideas and strategies with each other.

Once Telegram became aware of the way it’s app was being used by the terrorist group, it immediately blocked 78 IS-related channels across 12 languages, Venture Beat reported.

“We were disturbed to learn that Telegram’s public channels were being used by ISIS to spread their propaganda,” Telegram wrote in a publicly visible post in the app. “We are carefully reviewing all reports sent to us at [e-mail] and are taking appropriate action to block such channels. As a result, this week alone we blocked 78 ISIS-related channels across 12 languages.”

Alex Kassirer​, a counter-terrorism analyst with the New York-based private intelligence firm Flashpoint, said that IS had begun using Telegram broadcast channels to send press releases aimed at recruiting and inspiring followers, Fairfax reported.

Mr Brantly revealed the CTC had been monitoring the Jihadi Help Desk for about a year and had discovered it had five to six core members who were IT experts with at least a college or masters degree.

“You can kind of get a sense of where they are by when they say they are signing off to participate in the [Muslim] call to prayer,’’ which traditionally occurs at five specific times a day, he told NBC News. “They are very decentralised. They are operating in virtually every region of the world.”

He explained the help desk workers closely track the latest security software and encryption, then produce their own how-to-guides.

According to NBC News, the CTC obtained more than 300 pages of documents showing the help desk is training everyone from novice militants to the most experienced jihadists in digital operational security.

Mr Brantly said IS also distributes tutorials through Twitter and other social media and makes sure it links can be downloaded even after their sites are shut down.

He also said once the help desk operatives develop personal connections with people, ISIS then contacts them to engage them in actual operational planning — including recruiting, fundraising and potentially attacks.

“They will engage in encrypted person-to-person communications, and these are extremely hard to break into from a cryptographic perspective,” Mr Brantly said. “They also post YouTube Videos, going step by step over how to use these technologies.

“Imagine you have a problem and need to solve it and go to YouTube. They have essentially established the same mechanism [for terrorism].”