ISIS uses IP addresses sold to Saudi Arabia by British government

A group of hackers, known as VandaSec, have presented details to Mirror Online, a British newspaper, showing a link between IP addresses sold by the British government and ISIS Twitter accounts used for spewing promotional material online.


IP addresses are used to identify users on the Internet, being a virtual address at which their computer can be reached. IP addresses can be bought and then assigned to larger networks of users.

Outside Internet Service Providers, governments can also buy large IP blocks and use them inside their own administration offices.

According to Mirror Online, the British government had too many of these addresses and decided to sell a few off, especially after IPv4 addresses started to become unavailable in some parts of the world.

The British government decided to sell IP addresses from the Department of Work and Pensions to two Saudi Arabian firms, Saudi Telecom and the Mobile Telecommunications Company. The transaction took place around the end of October.

According to VandaSec, as soon as the operation was completed, ISIS members started using some of these IP addresses to recruit new members and publish promotional and violence-laden materials via Twitter.

Because the transaction was still very recent and did not have time to propagate across all Whois services, many people investigating ISIS propaganda might get a shock when they find that ISIS members tweeted out of British government buildings. In fact, the ISIS activists were actually in Saudi Arabia.