Syrian Electronic Cyber Army Copycat --‘Egyptian Cyber Army’ -- Strikes ISIS

Less than 24 hours after Islamic State social media accounts posted a threatening message from the group's leader, the audio was replaced with a song and its transcript with a logo resembling that of the Egyptian military, accompanied by Arabic writing that read "Egyptian Cyber Army."

ISIS chief “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's recording had been hacked, and the operation carried all the hallmarks of a group such as the Syrian Electronic Army,” Mashable reports.

It’s unclear how the Egyptian Cyber Army replaced Baghdadi's message. A spokesman for the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library where the recording was hosted, said that no outside account "made any modifications" to the files other than the original uploader. But that doesn't rule out the possibility that the account was hijacked by the hackers.

Supposedly, the SEA emulators are all Egyptians — some civilians, some with a military or police background — and all sympathizers of the Egyptian government led by former Commander-in-Chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Their motive is to defend al-Sisi's governments against any opponent, including ISIS.

"When we started the team we accepted that all the people can work in screwing the Brotherhood or ISIS or any radical Islamic party,” the spokesman of the Egyptian Cyber Army, who claimed to be a 37-year-old former Cairo police officer named Khaled Abubakr, told Mashable. "All the people instead of hearing this pig heard our song and laughed."

Experts who have been tracking the group say its actions suggest it is pro-government and anti-ISIS, but not necessarily sanctioned by the Egyptian government.

The group aims to disrupt the flow of information from al-Sisi's opponents, but also identify anonymous online activists to facilitate their arrest, according to Helmi Noman, a researcher with the Berkman Center at Harvard University and the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto.

"They should be taken seriously because of the potential [harm] their attacks can cause, even if they use low level skills such as phishing," he said.