ISIS Supporters Are Posting Tutorials for Wi-Fi Hacking and Spying Tools

Supporters of the violent, militant group known as the Islamic State or ISIS are attempting to circulate a small catalog of various spy tools, as well as tutorials on how to hack Wi-Fi networks in order to evade detection, in a package called the "Book of Terror."

It's difficult to tell if the guide is actually being used by the group, but the 5,232-page PDF was uploaded to a Pastebin-style site just over a week ago, and then linked to from an ISIS supporter forum on Saturday, the pseudonymous security researcher known as "Switched" told Motherboard.

The guide has chapters on apparent Islamic teachings, techniques for firing weapons, and the use of message encryption to evade surveillance. Versions of it pop up regularly on extremist forums, according to Switched, who said it's been going around for "years." It is written in English.

Elsewhere in the guide is a section on "Secret Spy Devices," such as a gadget for recording land-line telephone calls, a "high power" mobile phone jammer, and a video camera hidden within a small pen.

Several of the descriptions of the items have been copied word-for-word from consumer electronic sites, giving the impression that this guide has not been written by professional spies, but instead cobbled together from various sources.

Later on, the guide details "Wardriving," the practice of driving around with a laptop and cracking private Wi-Fi networks.

The guide describes how to use Kali Linux, a popular open-source penetration testing suite, and provides the simple commands needed to crack WPA and WEP encrypted networks.

"If you live in an area where there are Muslims then refrain from hijacking networks in order to protect these Muslims from harm," the guide reads. (This suggests it may be at odds with the core thinking in the Syria- and Iraq-based Islamic State, whose residents tend to persecute the many Muslims they deem infidels even more aggressively than other groups.) It appears that parts of the guide have been copied from penetration testing forums, and then very slightly modified.

Although there are signs that some members of the Islamic State are using encrypted messaging apps, and some of their supporters have staged high profile hacking campaigns, there is still a lot of hype and scare-mongering around the group and its use of technology. Plenty of breathless reporters have claimed that the group is taking full advantage of the dark web, or funneling finances through Bitcoin, despite minimal evidence supporting this. Overall, it seems unlikely that the use of spy tools or hacking into Wi-Fi networks is going to be adopted by the group or its supporters on a wider scale, if at all.