Hundreds of arrests across dozens of countries have been linked to “The Com”, an online community of predominantly young men who carry out acts of violence termed nihilistic extremism.
“It’s violence for the sake of violence,” EU counter-terrorism coordinator Bartjan Wegter told the Associated Press in an interview ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. Unlike Islamic jihadism, “there’s not a direct link with ideology”.
What is ‘nihilistic terrorism’?
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the leading UK-based think tank dedicated to combating extremism, defines nihilistic terrorism as “violent acts lacking an ideological motivation and driven by a misanthropic world-view”.
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Communities such as The Com form a “decentralised web of chats, forums and channels characterised by support for violence” but “with no specific political, ideological or religious goal”, although some factions have adopted extreme right-wing beliefs. The tactics and resultant harms of nihilistic extremists “often mirror those of ideologically motivated extremist networks”, with “some overlap between the two phenomena’s digital ecosystems, activities and cultural references”.
But this is “violence as a means of asserting oneself”, said the EU’s Wegter. It’s “a means of gaining status in those online communities”.
How do these networks recruit and operate?
Short for “The Community”, The Com is a broad online ecosystem that encourages and engages in cybercrime, extortion and violence.
Largely made up of young, male native English-language speakers, members range from “11-year-olds trying to hack Minecraft to people in their mid-20s targeting vulnerable kids online,” Aiden Sinnott, principal threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos, told The Guardian.
Communicating via encrypted platforms such as Discord and Telegram, the networks serve as a pipeline where “older members of The Com contact kids and try to get them to commit increasingly sophisticated acts of criminality”.
Activities are split into three subsets. Hacker Com includes groups such as Scattered Spider, linked to last year’s massive data breaches of retailers Marks & Spencer and the Co-op. In Real Life Com phones in fake bomb threats to schools and offers violence-as-a-service contracts, and is associated with a spate of random stabbings over the last year. Lastly, Extortion Com coerces young people into sharing or live-streaming acts of self-harm, sexually explicit behaviour or even suicide.
One of the most notorious networks within Extortion Com is 764. Founded by Texas teenager Bradley Cadenhead, who is currently serving an 80-year sentence in the US for possessing child sexual abuse material, the network now has victims and perpetrators in dozens of countries.
The UK’s National Crime Agency has said reports of Com networks increased six-fold in the UK from 2022 to 2024, and researchers at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center in the US have identified at least 295 arrests across 33 countries linked to The Com.
What is being done to tackle them?
These attacks are tough to prevent or track because the perpetrators are young individuals without a criminal record, usually, “who don’t leave any footprints other than online perhaps, but then it’s often behind encrypted walls and communities,” Wegter told AP News.
Over the summer, Europol ran a campaign to target nihilistic violent extremist content online. Investigators from nine countries participated in “Referral Action Days” to disrupt the online ecosystem, limit propaganda dissemination, and find new investigative leads, including identifying around 4,340 web addresses linked to The Com.
The campaign also aimed to enhance “platforms’ response to and awareness of terrorist content online produced and disseminated by The Com groups”, said the agency.
