Junaid Hussain was a British Pakistaniblack hat hacker and propagandist under the nom de guerre of Abu Hussain al-Britani who supported the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Hussain, who was raised in Birmingham in a family originally from Pakistan, was jailed in 2012 for hacking Tony Blair's accounts and posting his personal information online. Hussain left the UK around 2013 for Syria.
Hacking and propagandizing
Hussain was known as TriCk from the disbanded hacking group TeaMp0isoN. He was a key figure in a group of Islamist computer hackers who call themselves the Cyber Caliphate. The Islamist hackers have been involved in defacing French websites during the 2015 Île-de-France attacks and the Twitter feeds of the U.S. Central Command, Newsweek and the International Business Times. The group is believed to be behind the use of a spearphishing attack that exposed identities of rebel media groups. In March 2015, Hussain released a list of U.S. military personnel requesting that ISIL followers execute people on the list. While Hussain claimed to have breached US Department of Defense servers, the FBI assessed that the list was cobbled together from news articles, social media posts, and public records. Hussain was in online contact with one of the gunmen behind the Curtis Culwell Center attack of May 2015. Before the incident, an attacker posted online statements on Twitter, in which he requested others to follow Hussain's account. After the shooting occurred, Hussain wrote: "Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire."
An attempted lethal drone strike on Hussain instead killed three civilians and injured five about ten days before his death. The Sunday Times reported that US officials intended to assassinate Hussain, listing him as the third highest ISIL target on the Pentagon's "kill list" behind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Mohammed Emwazi due to his role in inspiring international lone wolf terrorism. US government sources reported Hussain was killed with two of his bodyguards in a drone strike on a car in a Raqqapetrol station on 24 August 2015. Hussain, 21 at the time of his reported death, was married to Sally Jones, 45, a fellow Briton who had joined ISIS, who denied his death through IS-linked Twitter accounts. Hussain and his wife regularly used their young son as a human shield to prevent drone attacks. On the occasion when he was killed he had ventured out without the child. Jones later confirmed he was killed. Hussain was reportedly killed on 25 August 2015 in a drone strike that was targeted as a result of his clicking on a compromised Internet link.
