The threat of Islamic State continues to sow fear, this time with the reported release of its latest kill list which bears the names of 264 state workers in Massachussets.
The list reportedly includes the names and addresses of government workers in the state and was released through social media over the weekend.
While Boston Police assured that there is no immediate threat to the workers, it was the Department of Homeland Security that alerted the state police on the presence of the list that was produced by suspected ISIS supporters United Cyber Caliphate, reported the New Boston Post.
This was not the first time a similar list was released by ISIS supporters as a list also surfaced in Brooklyn, Texas and Arkansas.
Meanwhile, Albanian hacker Ardit Ferizi, who admitted to providing material support for the Islamic State by being instrumental in creating one of their first kill lists including the names of 1,351 government and military personnel after hacking the server of an Illinois based company, has agreed to a plea deal, reported McClatchy DC.
Ferizi detailed his involvement in developing the kill list, as well as the ties he has established with Syria based hacker Junaid Hussain, a notorious cyber terrorist.
The Albaninan reportedly targeted an Illinois based company, who decided to report the breach in their system to the FBI.
The hacker reportedly asked the company for ransom to remove the malware from their server, as is the modus of other cyber hackers. But more than getting the money, Ferizi had another intent. He secured the files from the server that bore email addresses ending in .gov and .mil, and furnished them to the terror group which Hussain later released on social media. He threatened that his followers will "strike at your necks in your own lands!" against those included in the list.
While cyber experts have said that ISIS hackers are 1,000 times better now than they were years ago, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counter-terrorism expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, assured that cyber experts by the U.S. government are "orders of magnitude better" than terrorist supporters.
