US Military Launches Cyber Attacks on ISIS In Iraq, And Announces It

Short Bytes: This is the first time when the US has announced an open cyber attack. The cyber attack on ISIS will focus on recapturing the city of Mosul in Northern Iraq from ISIS. The electronic infrastructure of Iraq was set by the US during the reconstruction of Iraq and the US is going to capitalize on those electronics with the cyber attacks.

US has joined hands with Iraqi and Kurd forces to recapture the city of Mosul in Northern Iraq from the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh). This announcement was made by the Defense Department leaders of the US. According to the Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, the cyber attack has been launched against the communications infrastructure of the city.

This might be the first time that the US has openly announced a cyber attack as an integrated part of a military operation. Some of the efforts which the US might want to put in in the cyber attack would be:

Radio jamming
Decoding the conversation
Hacking online ISIS accounts and,
Other electronic sabotage

Out of these operations, some have already been performed in the past like in 1991 Gulf war, US used Radio jamming against Iraq. On the other hands, cyber attacks in the past have been attributed to the US (such as the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear program) and intelligence gathering to target individuals.

Carter talked about the intent of the attack and said,

interrupt and… disrupt ISIL’s command and control, to cause them to lose confidence in their networks, to overload their networks so they can’t function, and to do all of these things that will interrupt their ability to command and control forces there, control the population and the economy.

US military is surely on the advantageous side because Much of Iraq’s telecommunications infrastructure was put in place by the US during reconstruction from the Iraq War, and the military and NSA used that infrastructure for intelligence-gathering purposes while fighting the insurgency.

Also read: This Real-Time Cyber-Attack Map Shows the Truth of Global Cyber War