The targeting of ISIL hacker with a drone strike

Wall Street Journal:

U.S. and British officials decided earlier this year that a hacker needed to die.

Junaid Hussain, a British citizen in his early 20s, had risen fast to become a chief in Islamic State’s electronic army. One person familiar with the matter said he hacked dozens of U.S. military personnel and published personal and financial details online, including those of a general, for others to exploit.

He helped sharpen the terror group’s defense against Western surveillance and built hacking tools to penetrate computer systems, said people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Hussain was killed by a U.S. drone strike on Tuesday while he was in a car in Raqqa, Syria, U.S. officials said. That he was targeted directly shows the extent to which digital warfare has upset the balance of power on the modern battlefield.

Islamic State didn’t build a large cyber force like the U.S.’s National Security Agency or China’s People’s Liberation Army. Instead, it had people like Mr. Hussain, a convicted hacker whose suite of inexpensive digital tools threatened to wreak havoc on even the world’s most-powerful country. Islamic State communications described him as one of the group’s secret weapons, said one person who has seen them.

U.S. officials said they believe Mr. Hussain played an important role in recruiting two American Muslims to open fire in Garland, Texas, this spring on a contest for cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. He also frequently hacked into U.S. service members’ Facebook accounts to determine personal details and future targets, one of the people familiar with the probe said.

“If you don’t have anybody who is kind of fluent in computer operations, you’ve got a problem,” said Michael Sulmeyer, a former cyberpolicy expert for the Pentagon now at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “The ballgame is pretty much the coder or the individual.”

Mr. Hussain drew attention from U.S. and British intelligence and military agencies in part because of his efforts to recruit and incite violence, said one U.S. official. His importance to Islamic State made him a legitimate target, the official said. “Leadership: That is what gets our attention.”
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There is much more.

This maybe the first kinetic response to hacking.  Hussain was certainly a very dangerous enemy fighter.  Allied forces need to do a better job of locating his associates and eliminating them and their capability.  It will not be easy because increasingly ISIL is using encrypted messaging made possible by US companies as a response to the NSA disclosures of Snowden.  They are one reason why there have been more successful terrorist attacks of late.  What is also needed is a couter malware software that will attack the hackers when they try to get into a system.