ISIS publishes online hit list of US service members

An online group that calls itself the Islamic State’s “Hacking Division” has published profiles of 100 U.S. service members, including their names, photos and purported home addresses, encouraging its “brothers residing in America” to kill those named on the list.

The group, affiliated with the militant group ISIS, claimed to have “hacked several military servers, databases and emails” and gathered “personal information related to military personnel in the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Army.”

An unnamed defense department official told the New York Times that the hackers had likely pieced together the profiles from information they found in public databases rather than government servers, since many of the names on the list have appeared in media coverage of airstrikes against against the militant group.

Although the hackers claim to have a “huge amount of data…from various different servers and databases,” there is no evidence that they successfully infiltrated government computers.

Officials at the Pentagon and the FBI have said they are aware of the list and that they are investigating it.

The hit list is not the first time ISIS’ so-called “CyberCaliphate” has caused trouble for the U.S. military.

In January, hackers associated with the extremist group broke into U.S. Central Command social media accounts, tweeting threats to attack U.S. personnel and changing Central Command’s Twitter avatar to a picture of a masked militant bearing the legend “I love you ISIS.”

Authorities said the hackers did not gain access to any confidential material and said the hack was merely an act of vandalism.

The Twitter profile of U.S. Central Command after a group associated with ISIS hacked it in January

ISIS supporters have created hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts, which the militant group has used as part of a savvy propaganda and recruitment campaign.