From Brian Prince’s “How Terrorism Touches the ‘Cloud’ at RSA” (eWeek: 23 April 2009):
When it comes to the war on terrorism, not all battles, intelligence gathering and recruitment happen in the street. Some of it occurs in the more elusive world of the Internet, where supporters of terrorist networks build social networking sites to recruit and spread their message.
Enter Jeff Bardin of Treadstone 71, a former code breaker, Arabic translator and U.S. military officer who has been keeping track of vBulletin-powered sites run by supporters of al Qaeda. There are between 15 and 20 main sites, he said, which are used by terrorist groups for everything from recruitment to the distribution of violent videos of beheadings.… “One social networking site has over 200,000 participants. …
The videos on the sites are produced online by a company called “As-Sahab Media” (As-Sahab means “the cloud” in English). Once shot, the videos make their way from hideouts to the rest of the world via a system of couriers. Some of them contain images of violence; others exhortations from terrorist leaders. Also on the sites are tools such as versions of “Mujahideen Secrets,” which is used for encryption.
“It’s a pretty solid tool; it’s not so much that the tool is so much different from the new PGP-type [tool], but the fact is they built it from scratch, which shows a very mature software development lifecycle,” he said.