Hacking ISIS

Malcolm Nance is a globally recognized counterterrorism expert and intelligence community member who has been deployed to intelligence operations in the Balkans, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of The Plot to Hack America and Defeating ISIS and he appears regularly on MSNBC. Nance lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Nance was named a Genius for the Third Annual MSNBC and 92Y “7 Days of Genius” Festival in March 2016. Christopher Sampson is an expert in multimedia and terrorist use of cyberspace. He maintains the Terrorpedia database of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics, and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI) along with spearheading that group’s Terror Counter-Ideology Disrupt and Eliminate project. Sampson has been featured on the BBC as well as numerous radio broadcasts and newspapers. Ali H. Soufan is a former FBI special agent and counterterrorism interrogator. He is author of the New York Times bestseller The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War against Al Qaeda.

“Hacking ISIS, written by two of the world’s leading terrorist experts, brilliantly explains how ISIS recruits and brainwashes vulnerable people from around the world and how they spread its terrifying ideology. This book details a threat that affects us all and is a must read.” —Don. D. Mann, New York Times bestselling author of Inside SEAL Team Six “An authoritative, frightening who’s-who and what’s-what about the players, weapons, and battles in the shadowy cyber frontier of the war on terror.” —Fred Kaplan, author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War “Hacking ISIS is a deeply researched, meticulously detailed guide to how the world’s most reviled terrorist group has mastered the digital realm. An illuminating read for all who seek to understand and combat the scourge of violent extremism.” —Brendan I. Koerner, contributing editor at Wired and author of The Skies Belong to Us “Hacking ISIS is an excellent book and a perfect follow-up to Defeating ISIS. Nance and Sampson present—in a dynamic, detailed and gripping way—the unprecedented and severe challenges of the lethal combination of murderous terror inspired by extreme ideology blended with the proliferation of social media and advanced technology at the turn of the twenty-first century. —Avi Melamed, Salisbury Fellow of Intelligence and Middle East Affairs, the Eisenhower Institute and author of Inside the Middle East: Making Sense of the Most Dangerous and Complicated Region on Earth “Nance and Sampson detail the hidden, digital face of ISIS, its reach and successes as well as its crucial vulnerabilities. The book packages all of the electronic fronts, from Twitter and Facebook to secret web chats and forums, to the internal security databases built with Stasi-like obsessiveness by ISIS’ intelligence chiefs, most of them ex-Baathists. Readers will be struck by the determined progress of the Obama administration, which quietly and brutally squeezed ISIS, using captured hard drives and phones to assassinate key leaders and infiltrate the organization’s web activities. As the caliphate shrinks, the virtual jihad will swell, making this book a critical reference in plotting the way forward.” —Geoffrey Wawro, author Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East “Jihadists have been using the internet to recruit, fundraise, and radicalize followers for years. The emerging risk in terrorist use of the internet is ISIS and affiliated groups seeking to disrupt our critical infrastructure through digital attacks. Hacking ISIS is a great read on the history and ideology of these groups, and explores some of the options and actions to mitigate this growing threat.” —Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director, FBI (ret.)