He noted that executives worry about reaction from shareholders and customers, and fear that government agencies won’t keep the information confidential.įerizi’s attack, however, was serious. “Companies do see a lot of risk when they consider coming out into the open about cyber incidents,” said Tristan Reed, a security analyst at Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based global security consultancy. Appealing to the feds for help was an unusual step. One day last August, a system administrator at the Illinois company, which is not named in court documents, contacted the FBI about a cyber ransom demand. A charismatic hacker of Pakistani descent, Hussain had once run a collective, TeaMpOisoN, and had a club of fanboys. His tools? A Dell Latitude laptop, a second MSI laptop and computer application known as DUBrute, which allows a user to seize control of another computer remotely.įerizi had already established contact with Junaid Hussain, a Briton who Carlin called “one of the most notorious cyber terrorists in the world.” At the time, Hussain lived in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State. In early 2015, Ferizi traveled to Malaysia to study and “in part to get better access to bandwidth” to carry out cyberattacks, Carlin said. He adopted the moniker and claimed that the group had hacked systems in Serbia, Greece, Ukraine, France and the United States, including Microsoft’s Hotmail servers and a research domain operated by IBM. By his late teens had formed the Kosova Hacker’s Security, a group with vague pro-Muslim objectives. It marked one of the federal government’s first successful cyber terrorism cases in which an individual in custody admitted a link to a foreign terrorist organization.įerizi’s story is gleaned from federal court records, and an interview he once gave to Infosec Institute, a Chicago-based training center for technology professionals that also does research on hackers.Ī native of Gjakova in western Kosovo, Ferizi was largely self-trained in computers. He also signed a statement of facts outlining details of that support. On June 15, Ferizi signed a plea agreement in Alexandria, Virginia, in which he admitted to providing material support to terrorists and to computer hacking. Muslims the terrorist group considers apostates.įerizi, 21, was extradited from Malaysia last autumn and has been held by U.S. More recent lists have included thousands of ordinary civilians and even U.S. military and government employees to notify the targeted individuals. Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security.įerizi’s case is also notable because his handiwork generated one of the first “kill lists” issued by the Islamic State designed to generate fear and publicity. The case of Ardit Ferizi, an ethnic Albanian who was raised in Kosovo, is typical of hackers who “might act on behalf of a group but are also doing it for their own profit, for criminal means,” said John P.
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