Homeland Security News

The jihadis’ targets in Europe are depressingly repetitive: the Brussels metro, the Champs-Elysees in Paris (twice), tourist-filled bridges in London (twice) and a U.K. rock concert. And that’s just the past few months.

The steady stream of attacks on centers of daily life have drawn pledges from Europeans not to let terrorists change how they live, but in ways large and small they already have.

There is a heightened awareness and quicker reactions, especially in the hardest-hit countries of France, Britain and Belgium, that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.

In Brussels on Tuesday, a 36-year-old Moroccan man shouting “Allahu akbar!” set off a bomb among subway commuters. The bomb didn’t detonate in full and a soldier shot him dead.

It was another Muslim, Mohamed Charfih, who demanded that the subway’s doors be closed before the attacker could enter.

“I heard people on the platform shouting for help,” he told the news site DH. He looked out and knew what he saw. “I screamed to close the doors immediately. I asked to get out of there as fast as possible and that everyone get down on the floor.”

Read more:  AP

A number of government websites in the US state of Ohio, including that of Governor John Kasich, have been hacked to display a pro-IS message.

It said President Donald Trump would be held accountable for "every drop of blood flowing in Muslim countries" and ended "I love Islamic state".

The hacking was carried out by a group calling itself Team System DZ.

The Ohio governor's website was still down for maintenance at 17:30 local time (21:30 GMT).

The message in the hacking attack contained an Arabic symbol and was written mainly in the black and white used in the flag of so-called Islamic State.

The message on Mr Kasich's site also played an Islamic call to prayer.

The message read: "You will be held accountable Trump, you and all your people for every drop of blood flowing in Muslim countries."

A spokeswoman for Mr Kasich, Emmalee Kalmbach, said in a statement: "As soon as we were notified of the situation, we immediately began to correct it, and will continue to monitor until fully resolved."

Read more:  BBC News

Iraq's armed forces blocked a major wave of attacks by Islamic State suicide bombers outside the Old City of Mosul on Sunday, a military statement said.

The attacks targeted Hay al-Tanak, a poor neighborhood west of the Old City, the last stronghold of the militants in Mosul.

It is the first wave of attacks reported outside the Old City since the battle to capture the historic district from Islamic State started a week ago.

Source:  Reuters

Hackers have attempted to breach internet accounts associated with the U.K. Parliament, British authorities said Saturday, triggering a security response that left lawmakers unable to access their emails outside of Westminster this weekend.

The Houses of Parliament “discovered unauthorized attempts to access accounts of parliamentary network users” and is actively investigating the incident in coordination with the U.K. National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), it said in a statement Saturday afternoon.

Members of Parliament were first warned about the attempted cyberattack Friday evening, BBC reported. The alert said Parliament’s IT services department had detected “unusual activity” on its network and confirmed upon further investigation that hackers had conducted “a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an attempt to identify weak passwords,” according to a copy of the notification seen by The Guardian.

Hackers “specifically were trying to gain access to our emails,” the notice said, according to The Guardian.

It was not immediately clear if any of the attempted intrusions were successful.

Read more:  Washington Times