As anyone who manages a website can tell you, being hacked is one of the worst things. It's annoying, costs time and money to fix, and damages your reputation. Frequently, such hacks make it appear that your site is selling erectile dysfunction drugs, which just adds insult to injury for most people. Normally, we abhor such hackers for giving a bad name to legitimate online pharmacies or informational sites like ours. But in a rare role-reversal, the Viagra hackers are now the good guys, and they chose a target that couldn't be more worthy: ISIS.
Following the devastating terrorist attacks on Paris, the hack-tivist group Anonymous released a video putting ISIS on notice that the organization was now in their cyber-sabotage sights.
They were quick to make good on their threat, as Ghost Sec, an Anonymous-affiliated group, hacked an ISIS website and turned it into a temporary Viagra pharmacy. Instead of promoting jihad against Western depravity, the site encouraged visitors to chill out and buy some happy pills as an antidote to "Too much ISIS."
The usual propaganda was replaced with a message to "Enhance your calm," along with an ad linking to a pharmacy where visitors could purchase Viagra and Prozac with bitcoin. "Please gaze upon this lovely ad," the message continued, "so we can upgrade our infrastructure to give you ISIS content you all so desperately crave."
Although in the grand scheme, the hack is a minor setback for ISIS, it serves to make the jihadists look ridiculous, and controverts the tech-savvy image they try to project.
While we certainly don't condone website hacking in general, we applaud Anonymous for finding a creative way to say "Make love, not war."
