US military claimed 'success' in hacking ISIS: documents

[rangerrebew]

US military claimed 'success' in hacking ISIS: documents

By Afp

Published: 11:15 EST, 21 January 2020 | Updated: 11:15 EST, 21 January 2020


The US military claims to have "successfully" disrupted the online propaganda efforts of the Islamic State in a hacking operation dating back at least to 2016, according to declassified national security documents released Tuesday.

The heavily redacted, previously top secret documents said the US Cyber Command "successfully contested ISIS in the information domain" and limited its online efforts on radicalization and recruitment "by imposing time and resource costs" on the jihadist group.

The documents released by the National Security Archive at George Washington University offer the most detailed look at "Operation Glowing Symphony," the first offensive hacking operation acknowledged by the Pentagon.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-7912445/US-military-claimed-success-hacking-ISIS-documents.html

[PeteS in CA]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cyber-command-was-not-prepared-to-handle-the-amount-data-it-hacked-from-isis/

US Cyber Command was not prepared to handle the amount of data it hacked from ISIS

Documents obtained through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and made public today reveal that while successful, the US Cyber Command's campaign to hack ISIS faced some issues, such as lacking the storage space to store all the information stolen from ISIS accounts.

The six heavily-redacted documents published today by the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, reveal the conclusions of a 120-day assessment US Cyber Command conducted after the completion of Operation Glowing Symphony.

Carried out in November 2016, Operation Glowing Symphony was a classified offensive cyber operation executed by Joint Task Force Ares (JTF-Ares).
...
But data storage was just one of the technical and bureaucratic issues that JTF-Ares faced at the time. Other issues mentioned in the assessment include challenges in coordination with other coallition (sic) members and US government agencies, and a lenghty (sic) and overly complex process for vetting suspects, which made it difficult to engage time-sensitive targets.

Sounds like the success, for a time, overwhelmed available storage, evaluation, and exploitation resources. That the operation only happened in late 2016 strikes me as "odd". Imagination failure? Command delay/failure? If the latter, how far up the chain-of-command was the choke point?