The U.S. is supplementing its ground and aerial assaults on ISIS with a cyber-attack campaign, opening up a new, high-tech front in the war against the Internet-savvy terror group.
(FOX)- President Obama was scheduled Monday to address future efforts against ISIS at a conference in Germany with several European leaders, The New York Times reported. One of those efforts is the burgeoning cyber war.
“We are dropping cyberbombs,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work told The Times. “We have never done that before.”
Though the cyber assault is the latest tact taken in the effort to destroy the terror group, details of the program have been vague, and its effectiveness is tough to evaluate.
The National Security Agency has conducted phone surveillance on ISIS for years, The Times reported, but the NSA’s military counterpart, Cyber Command, had not trained its sights on ISIS until recently. Now, secret tech weapons employed against more traditional U.S. adversaries such as Iran and North Korea will be deployed against the Islamist group.
“Our cyber operations are disrupting their command-and-control and communications,” Obama said after an April meeting at CIA headquarters in Virginia.
The operation’s objective is to upset ISIS’ efforts to attract new recruits and spread propaganda. Officials also hope to stymie electronic cash transfers. By talking publicly about the program – albeit in little detail – the administration hopes to psychologically affect ISIS’ command structure, making them question the integrity of their communications. It’s also hoped that lower-level extremists may be scared off by the knowledge that someone may be monitoring them.