New Hacktivist Group Claims ISIS Used Bitcoin to Fund Paris Attacks

Hacktivist group Ghost Security Group told NewBTC that they had detected about an impending terror attack on Paris and currently gathering evidence for US government.

After last week’s terrorist attack in Paris, the key question appears to be how French intelligence and other western governments failed to anticipate such a well coordinated terror plan. Especially, since the massacre in the Charlie Hebdo office, France already passed a bill that allowed the French security services to wiretap communications, install secret surveillance cameras and sweep up metadata.

The answer, as far as Matthew Williams, a distinguished criminology researcher at Cardiff University, is concerned is that it is impossible for governments to analyze such vast quantities of data to pick up leads. “Picking out singular acts of crime or terror from an indiscriminate pile of civilian noise is all but impossible,” he said to Mic.

In September, German Deutsche Welle reported that ISIS are looking for ways to utilize blockchain technology to finance global terrorism. The report claimed that an activist group called GhostSec has trailed Bitcoin transactions amounting from $3 million to $23 million, where the source could have been ISIS.

After the Paris attacks, Ghost Security Group confirmed that ISIS is using Bitcoin exclusively to fund their operations.

Hacktivist groups like the Ghost Security was formed just after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and later, split into a new group called Ghost Security Group.

According to a Foreign Policy news report, the group receives around 500 tips about the ISIS activities online a day and it is a group of 12 members, who work 7 days a week to uncover websites and online activities linked to global terrorism. The group claimed that some of their members have cyber security and military backgrounds.

The front page of the group’s website features a quote from Michael S. Smith II of Kronos Advisory, LLC that says “A tweeting jihadi is a targetable jihadi.”