It appears that cyber jihadists are striking back at the academic and intelligence community, by binding their propaganda Ebooks with malware, then distributing them across different forums, thanks to a recently analyzed Ebook entitled "The Al-Qaeda network's timely entrance in Palestine" distributed by the Global Islamic Media Front - hat tip to Warintel.

If it were posted by a newly joined forum member, it would have logically raises the suspicion that it's in fact intelligence agencies spreading malware infected Ebooks around cyber jihadist forums, but it's since this one in particular is being distributed by what looks like a hardcore cyber jihadist, it brings the discussion to a whole new level.

What are they trying to achive? Abuse the already established trust of their readers and cyber jihadist supporters in order to snoop on their Internet activities, or it's the academic and intelligence community they are trying to monitor? In times when botnets can be rented and created on demand, they seem to be more interested in infecting their enemies. Moreover, I suspect that prior to the forum posting, private messages and emails were automatically sent to notify members whose number of posts at the forum greate outpace those of average observers, perhaps the target in such an attack.

The malware is detected by 9 out of 33 antivirus scanners as Trojan.Midgare.gra. Consider reading a previous post on "Terror on the Internet - Conflict of Interest" as well as through the related posts summarizing all the cyber jihadist research I've conducted so far.