ISIS propaganda ‘hidden on Internet archive’

Supporters of the Islamic State group are using the Internet Archive to frustrate efforts to delete their online propaganda, a study suggests.

The report analysed hundreds of thousands of links posted to two hidden forums used by the extremist group.

Archive.org links were found to be the most common type on both of the forums for the past two years.

The US-based service allows users to save and visit pages that might otherwise have been lost from the net.

A spokesman for the Internet Archive said it was taking steps to address the issue.

The research was carried out by the cyber-security firm Flashpoint.

It said the two forums were located on the “deep web” – referring to sites that do not show up in search engine results, but can still be accessed by a normal web browser.

It declined to provide their names for independent verification.

The researchers said a sample of more than 730,000 web links posted between the start of 2015 and the end of 2017 were gathered from one of the forums and 290,000 from the other.

Archive.org accounted for 14.3% of the harvested links on the larger forum in 2017, and 11.4% of those on the smaller one, according to the report.

YouTube links were the second most common and Google links came third – based on a grouping together of posts to its Drive, Photos and Google+ platforms.

Source: BBC