How British intelligence thwarted an online al-Qaeda magazine

An interesting report has emerged from the Washington Post, claiming that British intelligence intercepted an attempt by an al-Qaeda affiliate to publish an online jihadist magazine in English.

The magazine, called ‘Inspire’, was launched on June 30th 2010. It was billed as “the first magazine issued by al-Qaeda in the English language”, and it was a call to arms for individual terrorists.

When launched, however, the front cover promised instructions on how to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”, and an “Exclusive interview with Sheik Abu Basir al-Wahishi”, a former aide to Osama bin Laden. But the content inside was somewhat different.

You see, pages 4 to 67 of the magazine were filled with binary nonsense, and it seems that British intelligence carried out the interception after their US counterparts opted not to intervene. It took almost a fortnight for the publishers to realize and post a corrected version.

The magazine’s front cover and contents pages were left intact in the corrupted version, so it was only the actual ‘useful’ content that was blotted.

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Mikko H. Hyppönen from F-Secure also covered the piece, and he provided some snapshots of the magazine in its original form, and of the corrupted version, side-by-side:

Hyppönen also noted:

“When we analyzed the corrupted version, we thought it would be plausible that it would contain malware or exploits. However, it did not.”

It seems that al-Qaeda has since gone on to publish a further four online issues of the PDF magazine, all reportedly without any further attempts to intercept. Indeed, it seems that such a ploy is too difficult to pull-off regularly.