Hussain, from Birmingham, steered the computer hacking division for the terror group before he was killed in August by an United States drone carrying out a joint operation with Britain.
His wife, Sally Jones, remains on the government’s list of most dangerous ISIS recruits. Majority of the victims were residing in Saudi Arabia, with a few of them possessing British nationality.
“[Hussain] was involved in recruiting ISIL sympathizers in the West to carry out lone-wolf style attacks”, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder said in announcing Hussain’s death in September, using another name for the Islamic State group.
One victim said: “I am horrified at how they got hold of my details”.
“Yes, that’s my password”, one of the victims, a doctor, told the newspaper.
The hacking team, which called itself the Cyber Caliphate, posted its propaganda through 54,000 infiltrated accounts. ‘We are back, ‘ it declared in an opening tweet. Under the hacked Twitter accounts, the terror group posted its rhetoric and also divulged hacked phone numbers of heads of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US National Security Agency (NSA).
Experts have warned the attack is a unsafe escalation of the global cyber war. That’s not all, shortly after his demise, Cyber Caliphate briefly took control of a Pentagon-owned Twitter account during the month of January, but has kept a low online profile in order to prevent being captured by the authorities.
“Users can’t [use Twitter to] threaten or incite violence, which includes promoting terrorism”, a spokesperson for Twitter said. “It is very worrying that terrorists are gathering data in this way”, cyber security expert Tony McDowell said. It is understood that no security breaches occurred.
The account that initially shared the credentials has since been suspended, and a spokesman for Twitter directed Daily Mail to company policy which states “Posting another person’s private and confidential information is a violation of the Twitter Rules”.