Hackers vs. Drones: ISIS Cyber Caliphate Leader Junaid Hussain

In what may be a first move in the new escalation of cyber warfare with kinetic results, Junaid Hussain, the 20-something hacker who fled to ISIS after being charged with hacking Tony Blair's email accounts, has been killed by a drone strike.

CNN is running with the exclusive at this time claiming "The U.S. military and intelligence community is in the final stages of confirming that a U.S. drone strike this week killed Junaid Hussain."

(Click for CNN Story)

CNN quotes "several U.S. officials" that "the drone strike was specifically targeting Hussain traveling in a vehicle in Syria after the U.S. got intelligence on where he was and watched him to confirm his presence before striking."

Those who follow the defacement community will be well-familiar with Hussain's previous shenanigans online as the leader of Team Poison.  He gradually drifted from target-of-opportunity defacing to more difficult "called target" defacing, and was eventually jailed at age 18 by the British government after publishing the details of Tony Blair's email accounts, as broadly documented in July of 2012.

Click for Telegraph story

Hussain, who hacked under the name "Trick" during his Team Poison days in England, was sentenced to six months imprisonment for "conspiring to commit public nuisance," "causing a computer to perform a function to gain unauthorized access to data or programs" and "defacing numerous websites" between January 1, 2010 and April 14, 2012.  After his release he was arrested again for his cyber activities and fled the country while out on bail.

2012 - TeaMp0ison hacks NATO

 Hacking governments and militaries was something TeamPoison (TeaMp0isoN) had been doing for years prior to Trick's run-in with the UK authorities.  Above is a typical rant from Trick decrying NATO, BAE Systems, BP Oil, and Rupert Murdoch.

On August 3, 2015, the Mirror ran the headline "ISIS: British computer hacker who fled to Syria is third on US hit list of key Islamist militants".  At that time, he was using his new jihadi-friendly hacking name of "Abu Hussain al-Britani".  According to the Mirror article, only Jihadi John (Mohammed Emwazi) and ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were more wanted on the US "kill list."

Among his crimes, Hussain was identified as the man suspected in hacking the Twitter and Facebook accounts of US Central Command.Their most recent Twitter accounts @UmmHussain_18 and @AbuHussain_23 were created after their August 13th leak of US government personnel contact information caused #17 and #22 to be deleted by Twitter.

His 45-year-old rock-musician wife Sally Jones, now "Umm Hussain Al-Britani" and their 10-year-old son also lived with him in Syria.  As of 14AUG2015, there was concern that she may have been seen back in England:

Click for "Mrs. Terror Back in Britain?"