[ISN] How Terrorism Touches the 'Cloud' at RSA

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/How-Terrorism-Touches-The-Cloud-at-RSA-287707/

By Brian Prince
eWEEK.com
2009-04-23

At the RSA Conference, former U.S. military officer Jeff Bardin showed 
attendees the cyber-world aspects of terrorism, where supporters of 
groups such as al Qaeda use social networks to recruit and spread their 
message. In an interview with eWEEK, Bardin discussed some of the things 
he has seen online.

When it comes to the war on terrorism, not all battles, intelligence 
gathering and recruitment happen in the street. Some of it occurs in the 
more elusive world of the Internet, where supporters of terrorist 
networks build social networking sites to recruit and spread their 
message.

Enter Jeff Bardin of Treadstone 71, a former code breaker, Arabic 
translator and U.S. military officer who has been keeping track of 
vBulletin-powered sites run by supporters of al Qaeda. There are between 
15 and 20 main sites, he said, which are used by terrorist groups for 
everything from recruitment to the distribution of violent videos of 
beheadings.

“[Osama] bin Laden said back in the late '90s that 90 percent of this 
war is information,” said Bardin, founder and chief strategist for 
Treadstone 71, in an interview with eWEEK at the RSA Conference in San 
Francisco. “One social networking site has over 200,000 participants. 
I’ve had conversations where I’ve got over 320 different responses – a 
heck of a lot better than I get on a blog on CSO [online.com].”

[...]


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