Twenty-one year old Junaid Hussain, the notorious ISIS hacker from Birmingham, UK who masterminded the terrorist group’s online war, was killed in a US drone strike earlier this week. Hussain is also linked to the Garland, Texas, draw Mohammed attack. Number three on a Pentagon kill-list, only Jihadi John and ISIS leader al-Baghdadi are higher value targets.
Hussain, who also operated under the alias Abu Hussain al-Britani, did some time for stealing personal information on Tony Blair. Together with his wife, a former punk rocker, they were dubbed ‘Mr & Mrs Terror’. Mrs. Terror, Sally Jones, is 45, a convert to Islam and a mother with a young son. Eventually, she moved to Syria with her child and now leads a violent all-female ISIS brigade.
According to CNN:
“Several U.S. officials confirmed to CNN that the drone strike was specifically targeting Hussain traveling in a vehicle in Syria after the U.S. got intelligence on where he was and watched him to confirm his presence before striking.”
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“Hussain is described by U.S. officials as a high-value target in ISIS.
“This is a great intelligence success,” one U.S. official told CNN.”
Hussain was involved in circulating the hit list of addresses and pictures of US military personnel, which was assembled by fellow members of the Islamic State Hacking Division. As for his part in the Garland attack, the authorities believe Hussain inspired one of the gunmen to launch the attack by radicalizing him via private messaging.
CNN reports that, “Hussain’s death would remove the most prolific of all of ISIS’s English-language propagandists, according to CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank. In recent months, Hussain has incessantly called for attacks in the West over Twitter, as well as groomed potential terrorists in Western countries over encrypted online messaging apps, such as ‘Surespot,’ Cruickshank said.”
Prior to his involvement in the Garland attack, Junaid Hussain had an extensive history of black hat hacking and went by the pseudonym “TriCk.”
At the time of his death, Hussain’s gang of nefarious hackers were embroiled in a digital spat with Operation ISIS (OpISIS), a counterterrorism collaboration between Ghost Security (GhostSec) and Anonymous hacktivists. During the first week of August, “a representative for a pro-Islamic State hacking group issued a chilling warning to members of the U.S. military and government Wednesday, promising that ‘very soon’ followers of the organization would retaliate for overseas bombing targeting the terror organization,” according to The Blaze.
He went on to slam OpISIS, saying, “Anonymous, GhostSec, CtrlSec who are apparently ‘hackers’ against IS, till date they have hacked nothing, they are all talk.” The representative continued, claiming that “the only thing they can do is report twitter accounts and DDoS websites for 5mins.”