Al Qaeda's top cyber-terrorist: suprisingly stupid

 
Here's how London's Daily Mail put it:

A computer nerd from Shepherd's Bush, West London, became al Qaeda's top internet agent... Younes Tsouli, 23, an IT student at a London college, used his top-floor flat in W12 to help Islamist extremists wage a propaganda war against the West.

Under the name Irhabi 007 — combining the James Bond reference with the Arabic for terrorist — he worked with al Qaeda leaders in Iraq and came up with a way to convert often gruesome videos into a form that could be put onto the Web...

His capture led to the arrest of several Islamic terrorists around the world, including 17 men in Canada and two in the US... His 10-year jail sentence was increased to 16 years last month.

At first intelligence operatives who came across his activities dismissed him as a joke. It was only when anti-terrorist detectives began trawling through files on his computer after his arrest that they realised his true significance.

When he was seized, forensic science officers found that Tsouli had been creating a website called YOUBOMBIT.

...Tsouli arrived in London in 2001 with his father, a Moroccan diplomat. He studied IT at a college in central London and was quickly radicalised by images of the war in Iraq posted on the internet... In 2005, Tsouli became administrator for the web forum al-Ansat, used by 4,500 extremists to communicate with each other, sharing such practical information as how to make explosives and how to get to Iraq to become a suicide bomber... But the enterprise had become so huge, it began to attract the attention of cyber-trackers who monitor the internet for extremists, leading to Tsouli's arrest...

Looks like Tsouli fell down the steps as left his flat for the police station.

And I'm a bit surprised some venture capitalist didn't fund YOUBOMBIT, thinking it was a YouTube competitor.