A 20-year-old man from Kosovo, Ardit Ferizi, was arrested in Malaysia for supplying the self-declared Islamic State with personal information of U.S. officials, Reuters reports.
The computer science student was charged with hacking the personal information of 1,351 U.S. military personnel and federal employees. Malaysian police, who arrested Ferizi at the request of the U.S., say that he had been in contact with an ISIS member in Syria about hacking servers to obtain information about U.S. security personnel.
Ferizi, who is thought to be the leader of Kosova Hacker’s Security, an Internet hacking group, supposedly supplied ISIS with the information sometime between April and August. On August 11, an alleged conspirator tweeted, “NEW: U.S. Military AND Government HACKED by the Islamic State Hacking Division!”
The tweet included a link to a 30-page document which read, “We are in your emails and computer systems, watching and recording your every move. We have your names and addresses.” The document warned that the information would soon be passed along to ISIS fighters, “who soon with the permission of Allah will strike at your necks in your own lands!”
John Carlin, Assistant U.S. Attorney General, commented on the arrest: “This case is a first of its kind and, with these charges, we seek to hold Ferizi accountable for his theft of this information and his role in ISIL’s targeting of U.S. government employees.”
More than 100 Malaysian citizens have been arrested this year alone on suspicion of being connected to ISIS.
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