Al-Qaeda's online forums go offline

In early April 2012, Al-Qaeda went quiet online \u2014 and the silence was the story.

All of the extremist network's main internet sites had gone silent for more than a week in what analysts called an unprecedented blackout for the forums. The outage hit several online forums, including the two "flagship" sites \u2014 al-Fida and Shamukh al-Islam \u2014 which functioned as the network's stamp of approval: they authenticated Al-Qaeda's message and served as the only place a true believer knew they could get it. "All of them essentially went down" around March 23, said Aaron Zelin, a researcher who tracked extremist Islamist sites for jihadology.net.

The forums usually post messages announcing a temporary interruption when they take sites down themselves. This time there was nothing \u2014 which bore all the signs of a cyber attack, analysts and former US officials said. Evan Kohlmann of Flashpoint Partners, who had tracked jihadist websites for over a decade, said the attack appeared to involve separate, coordinated hits on both the Shamukh domain name and its data server. A second-tier forum, Ansar al-Mujahideen, was restored within three days; Shamukh reappeared but had not resumed its message threads.

Nobody claimed responsibility, and the suspect list was long: government intelligence agencies from the US or UK, or private hackers and vigilantes \u2014 one self-described "hacktivist for good" was among the names floated. James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted the breadth and duration of the outage suggested a deliberate campaign, and that the group's difficulty restoring service "could be seen as a sign of decline."

But the attack also reopened a long-running debate in US intelligence and policymaking circles: whether taking the sites down is even wise. The forums were an open secret and a valuable intelligence resource \u2014 Kohlmann himself compared them to spy satellites, saying "bringing them down is like shooting at your own spy satellites." Others disagreed. By mid-April, Shamukh was back with a defiant message translated by Flashpoint, calling the takedown "a failed, miserable campaign."

Based on AFP, Associated Press, and specialist reporting from April 2012.

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