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US Bombs ISIS Command Center After 'Moron' Posts Selfie Online

posted by janrinok on Saturday June 06 2015, @08:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the well-he-won't-do-that-again dept.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Brian Everstine writes at Air Force Times that US intelligence officers were able to locate and bomb an Islamic State command center based on a photo and comments in social media. "The [airmen are] combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command," said Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command. "And in some social media, open forum, bragging about command and control capabilities for Da'esh, ISIL, And these guys go 'ah, we got an in.' So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three JDAMS take that entire building out. Through social media. It was a post on social media. Bombs on target in 22 hours."

Carlisle was careful to not go into great detail about the how the information was gathered and what additional effort went into targeting those bombs. It's easy to imagine that in addition to the information gleaned from the initial post that the Air Force used satellite and drone reconnaissance data. It's also possible that US intelligence could have actively engaged with the original poster in order to draw out information. Attackers and researchers have shown time and time again that simply asking a target for information—either by posing as a trusted individual or using carefully created phishing attacks—works even better than fancy information-stealing digital attacks.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday June 06 2015, @11:59AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 06 2015, @11:59AM (#192856) Journal
    Are now the US generals recruited from teenagers? Or does the language evolve too quickly for my old age?
    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2015, @02:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2015, @02:26PM (#192884)

    What language are you referring to? I didn't find any quotes from the General in the article that I would consider to use language that is generally only used by teenagers. In fact it is just the term "selfie" which I would possibly consider to be "teenage language" and "selfie" appears not to feature in the article at all. Although these days I think that term has moved into general usage.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:51AM

    by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:51AM (#193164) Journal

    "And in some social media, open forum, bragging about command and control capabilities for Da'esh, ISIL, And these guys go 'ah, we got an in.'"
    Yeah, almost sounds like valley-girlish, fer sure [youtube.com].