The shocking discovery made by intelligence officers and code breakers in Israel, Britain and the United States revealed that seemingly innocuous chats are often much more, according to new sections in the book Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad.

Code breakers found that al-Qaeda is now using a technique to encrypt its messages in goods offered for sale on eBay.

Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence officers who spent time tracking the Internet message board Reddit found more than once, that a terrorist used hexadecimal characters and prime numbers as code. 

After the messages were decoded, they sometimes indicated an attack was being planned or even about to happen, according to excerpts printed in The New York Post.

Terrorists are even hiding messages in 'X-rated pornographic pictures which conceal documents and orders for the next target,' one intelligence source told author Gordon Thomas.

In a fight back, MI6 in London and Mossad have recruited linguist specialists in Arabic, Urdu and Pashto to translate the online magazines that both al-Qaeda and ISIS are publishing with instructions.

This, they hope will infiltrate a message about a planned attack before it takes place. 

In the wake of the brutal Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, both ISIS and al-Qaeda have been concealing messages to their followers. 

Both Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, and MI6 in London confirm that there has been an increase in this type of traffic online, according to the book.

However, when an attack appears imminent in a particular country, Mossad sends details to that nation's intelligence service's cybercommand.

By working with each other in unison, intelligence agencies hope to prevent future attacks.

Cyber units worldwide are becoming increasingly important in the fight against terror.

A number of the most skilled cryptologists in the Mossad unit for example, have mastered steganography, how to conceal secret information within a digital file.

Cryptologists have the ability to explore an area inaccessible to the search engines of Google, Yahoo and Bing called the dark side, or dark web.

This no-go zone contains billions of Web pages and is estimated to be 5,000 times larger than any other on the Internet.  

Much of this information is detailed in a 2015 version of a book by author Gordon Thomas called 'Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad.'

It delves into the clandestine world of Israel's spy agency, the Mossad.

Mossad is using its new cyberwarfare department to track threats and attack Iran's nuclear capacity. 

The eleventh director of the spy agency, Tamir Pardo, was determined that Israel would not experience an event similar to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.

This decision came after it was revealed that an intercepted phone message by the American National Security Agency hinted at the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - but it was caught too late. 

Pardo understood the importance of cyberwarfare after undergoing training at the NSA.

He was backed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who told him that their electronic battles against cyberattacks were regarded as Israel's most important defense. 

Meanwhile, Iain Lobban, the head of Britain's Government Communication Headquarters revealed the country's Ministry of Defense was once targeted over 1,000 times a month. 

He identified the attacks were mostly coming from the Tenth Bureau, the highly secret department of China's People Liberation Army responsible for science and technology.

In the United States, General Keith B. Alexander, the head of the Pentagon's Cyber Command, confirmed that 'our targets are enemy military command centers that we can reach from cyberspace.' 

(dailymail.co.uk)