The Rabbit Hole: FBI’s Most Wanted Faces Charges in Virginia

Editor’s Note: In this week’s The Rabbit Hole — a weekly series that dives deep in one underreported federal docket — our reporting fellow Peter Beck breaks the news of the arrest of a Syrian man accused of hacking some of the most prominent media organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, Forbes, CNN, NPR, USA Today, the AP, and Reuters. Beck also tracks the rise of the Syrian Electronic Army and its significance for future hacktivist organizations. 

In 2011, a group of hacktivists that called themselves the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) breached Harvard University’s firewall and placed a picture of Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad on its website. The group wrote a message on Harvard’s website that left little ambiguity about the perpetrators behind the attack, that the “Syrian Electronic Army Were Here.” It was one of hundreds of cyber attacks waged by the hacker collective against targets that it perceived as opponents to Assad’s’s violent regime, and marked an era when policymakers and the public grew increasingly concerned about the U.S.’s cyber vulnerabilities.

Now, more than a decade after the cyber attacks, one of SEA’s purported leaders, Ahmad ‘Umar al Agha, is in U.S. custody and awaiting trial in the Eastern District of Virginia for conspiracy to commit computer fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. His arrest, which has not been previously reported, comes eleven years after the FBI filed a criminal complaint against Agha and subsequently offered a $100,000 reward for his arrest. The SEA’s alleged co-leader, Firas Dardar, appears to remain at large.