Hacktivists offer unprecedented insight into their battle to smash jihadis' online recruitment and propaganda machine War of the world wide web: Anonymous wants to help defeat ISIShttp://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/meet-anonymous-linked-international-cyber-7133999
During the Spanish Civil War, huge numbers of boys left their homes and volunteered to fight against fascism.
Now thousands of angry young men and women are fighting a very modern war against ISIS without even leaving their bedrooms.
Mirror.co.uk has spent several weeks talking to a shadowy group of computer experts who have banded together under the name Varuna Group to do their bit in the conflict against the so-called Islamic State.
This Anonymous-inspired "virtual international brigade" agreed to tell their story in a bid to inspire others to join the battle against an enemy which expertly uses the internet to spread propaganda and win over new recruits.
We have agreed to withhold the real names of the group, which told us that most of their members are actually women.
"We know how effective ISIS is at using online media to recruit people," one member of the group said.
"It sickened me to see all the violent images and videos they put online and most especially how young people were somehow perversely attracted to them.
"When you see the violence that these ISIS members put out into the world, you really want to take them on."
The hackers were inspired to take action against online ISIS supporters afterAnonymous' declaration of "war" following the terror attacks on Paris.
Although they have never actually met in real life, the group became friends after getting involved in last years' campaign to "troll" ISIS , which was part of the wider Anonymous "OPISIS" campaign.
As they began to understand the extent and power of the Islamic State propaganda machine, the group decided to take further action.
Now they have built up a vast database of intelligence which shows how ISIS supporters use the internet to spread their message of jihad - and how hacktivists are trying to stop them.
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They have reported vast numbers of Twitter accounts, resulting in their closure, and keep a watchful eye on the social network to help stop extremists from maintaining an online presence.
Their work reveals:
ISIS have developed sophisticated tools to help them dodge social media bans and continue spreading their message of hate.
Extremists hide videos depicting sickening acts of violence inside cartoons, in the hope of exposing youngsters to their vile propaganda.
Hacktivists are bombarded with death threats and face a heavy psychological toll as they come face-to-face with the sickening videos created by their enemies.
The ISIS online Encyclopedia of Terror has been massively expanded and now contains recipes for creating the poison ricin, building 'sticky bombs' and kidnapping innocent people
Video nasties
Mal-content: This is the innocuous beginning to a very disturbing video
The Anonymous-linked hackers showed us a disturbing video which was "hidden" inside a cartoon, so that it could be posted on YouTube without being automatically censored.
One video started with a Christmas scene, before abruptly cutting to horrific imagery of a man being burned to death inside a metal cage.
"There is a fraternity and sisterhood that gets formed from seeing so much violence and constantly being attacked online," a hacker told us.
"We have seen people getting stoned to death or beheaded.
Disturbing: A screenshot from an Islamic State video
"It's cruel stuff that haunts us when we turn off the virtual world and get back into real life."
Anonymous and its offshoots want to make sure this sort of vile content is wiped off the internet permanently by identifying the individuals which publish it and then reporting them to Twitter.
"We report not only Daesh [ISIS] accounts but also tweets that show beheadings of people in detail - not only as pictures but also as cruel and bloody videos," a hacker said.
Overall, the hacktivists have now identified 15,000 Isis Twitter accounts in our list and 500 websites.
The ISIS digital 'secret weapon'
Sally Jones: This former punk rocker is a prominent ISIS supporter and propagandist
The wider Anonymous OPISIS campaign has seen tens of thousands of extremist Twitter accounts shut down, prompting Islamic hackers to come up with their own ways of dodging social media bans.
We have learned that one Libyan computer expert has devised a program which will automatically change a person's Twitter's username every 15 minutes.
Previously, extremists like the British "jihadi bride" Sally Jones were forced to set up brand new Twitter accounts several times a day, because the social network kept banning her.
But the new digital tool could allow them to automatically dodge ban attempts, without having to go through the laborious process of starting up a new account.
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