We are all familiar with the help desks of private companies that help us answer questions and seek instructions on how to use their products.
Quite alarmingly, the Islamic State (ISIS) extremist organisation has developed a similar help desk to assist its militants around the world secretly communicate while planning terror attacks, counterterrorism analysts revealed, according to NBC News.
These help desks are manned around the clock by half-dozen senior operatives who teach would-be jihadists advanced communication skills, such as how to use encryption and other secure networks so as not to be detected by the authorities.
This new piece of information was revealed by counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army to NBC News, just a few days after Islamic militants launched brazen terror attacks in Paris, which left over 120 people killed.
The attacks on the French capital have prompted authorities to pay particular attention to the ISIS' growing cyber capabilities.
Aaron Brantly, a counterterrorism analyst at the Combating Terrorism Center, explained that using this help desk, the ISIS can plan and coordinate terror attacks without showing up in authorities' massive collection of signals intelligence.
"They've developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning," Brantly told NBC News.
He added that this new development shows that the ISIS is already "now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications."
"They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror. Clearly this enables them to communicate and engage in operations beyond what used to happen, and in a much more expeditious manner," the counterterrorism analyst explained.
Brantly further described the Jihadi Help Desk as "a fairly large, robust community" scattered in different parts of the world.
"They are very decentralised. They are operating in virtually every region of the world," he said.
What is even more alarming is that the extremists manning the Jihadi Help Desk are keeping themselves updated on new kinds of security software and encryption as they come online.
These help desk personnel also come up with instruction materials to teach fellow jihadists on how to use these new technologies.
"They also post YouTube videos, going step by step over how to use these technologies. Imagine you have a problem and need to solve it and go to YouTube; they have essentially established the same mechanism [for terrorism]," Brantly explained.
