US officials believe that Sally Ann Jones, former British punk rocker, is looking to run the Islamic State's hacker staff. If successful, Jones, 45, would become ISIS's most public European national to openly endanger the US and UK's networks.
“She appears to have picked up the flag of her late husband and is actively working to incite attacks and recruit new members,” a US military official said.
Jones was once the UK's most notorious traitor to ISIS. She could now become a huge target of US-led coalition airstrikes, which in August killed her 21-year-old husband, Junaid Hussein, a leader of ISIS's hacking campaign.
Today at the request of British authorities, Jones was added to the UN's sanctions list along with three other UK jihadists. The sanctions include a travel ban and freeze of assets. Jones is reported to have tweeted that she was "laughing out loud" at the news.
It is believed that the 9/11 Twitter hashtag campaign, #AmericaUnderHacks, was under Jones's control on behalf of ISIS. A kill list of military, law enforcement and other government personnel's names were acquired from government websites, which a second US military official called “lame”.
“She is a fanatic but as far as we know she has no hacking skills,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies. “It's not clear what is going on beneath the surface.”
