At a conference on military technology in Washington, D.C., National Security Agency Deputy Director Richard Ledgett said the core of Islamic State leadership is incredibly “OPSEC savvy.”

According to Ledgett, the reason why ISIS has sophisticated operations security (OPSEC) practices is because its leadership is comprised of former al-Qaida members in Iraq. They survived the U.S. invasion and now have a much clearer idea of how the U.S. conducts its operations in nearly every aspect.

“Their history goes back to–they started as al-Qaida in Iraq, and so the ones who started ISIL were the ones who survived all those years during the surge, and so their core is very security savvy,” Ledgett said.

ISIS also has shown a strong ability to adapt to U.S. tactics and neutralize internal security threats.

“They look for the effects of action directed against them and trace back to see how that may have happened and they take measures to secure the vulnerabilities they think there are,” Ledgett said. “It doesn’t help that sometimes we get leaks from people who talk about, “We have this particular operation where we took someone off the battlefield and here is how we did it.” They pay attention to that.”

As ISIS has faced increasing external pressure, fighters having to grin and bear through low salaries are starting to defect and feed intelligence to the U.S.-led coalition in exchange for payoffs, making OPSEC management for the terror group that much more difficult.

In an effort to clamp down on leaks, ISIS has started mass executions of its own fighters to stem the tide and also now has a counter-intelligence program to feed fake intelligence on the location coordinates of leaders to suspected defectors. If a U.S. airstrike hits that place, the group knows who remains loyal and who does not.

Human intelligence is difficult for ISIS to get a handle on, but encryption is no longer a feat at all, Ledgett noted.

“It used to be that you had to be pretty technically astute to use encryption on a personal device or personal communications,” Ledgett said. “What’s happened over the years is that that’s become user friendly and very easy to use and now unsophisticated actors can install very high grade encryption on their devices. And so ISIL uses that to hide their activities.”

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