A pro-ISIS hacker group called the United Cyber Caliphate (UCC) has released its longest "kill list" of over 8,000 people including a number of Americans, Australians, Britons and Canadians.
According to Vocativ, the hacker group released a list of names, addresses and email contact details of 8,318 people on a secretive messaging application called Telegram. A post on the application, written in both Arabic and English, stated that UCC urged its supporters to "follow" the list and "kill them strongly to take revenge of Muslims."
The kill list is the longest that any ISIS-affiliated group has distributed till date. It includes names of 7,848 Americans, 312 Canadians, 39 Britons and 69 Australians and the rest of them belong to countries like Belgium, Brazil, China, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden and Trinidad and Tobago.
It is still unclear as to why these people have been targeted. It is also not known whether the list has any new information which was not already available online.
According to Press Trust of India, most of those listed are military or government workers or well-known personalities, like royal people or celebrities.
According to a study by intelligence firm Flashpoint, UCC is the result of a merger of several pro-ISIS hacker groups that are incompetent in hacking.
Therefore, UCC has now taken to publishing "hit lists" and calling on ISIS loyalists to attack various individuals like the Minnesota cops, the US state department officials and civilians.
Vocativ, however, cited a report by the Wall Street Journal which stated that counter terrorism officials are still trying to figure out if such lists are released to only instill fear in the minds of individuals or actually threaten them.
