Terrorist in the Internet

In the developed world, the influence of information systems can now be seen in most operational areas of business.

A significant result of these advances is that organizations have become increasingly dependent upon the availability of systems and reliant upon the data they hold.

In recent years the internet has grown from a solely military/academic network to one that can be used by business or individual.

In the years since the first WWW applications were developed, there has been an explosion in the global use of the internet. With this growth has come an increasing usage of the medium by criminal and terrorist groups.

The term terrorist or terrorism is a highly emotive term. Generally it is use t0 denote “revolutionists who seek to use terror systemically to further their views or to govern a particular area”.

‘Cyber-terrorism’ is a different form of terrorism since physical systematic terror does not usually occur (although it can if it causes disruption to a critical system), but a widespread destruction of information resources can.

The problem of defining the term ‘terrorist’ relates to the fact that a terrorist group could easily be perceived as a resistance group carrying out lawful or morally legitimate actions.

Terrorist or resistance groups have difficulty in relaying their political messages to the general public without encountering censorship, they can now overcome this by using the Internet.

Different terrorist groups or political parties use the Internet for a variety of different reasons:
• Irish Republican Information Service is a service offering news articles relating to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein offer their own site containing of information about Sinn Fein, the armed struggle, policy documents………
• Zapatista Movement. They have several sites, detailing their struggle against the Mexican authorities.
• Third world terrorist/resistance groups have a cyber space presence.
Terrorist in the Internet

Cyber terrorism

Online terrorism, computer crimes and cyber attacks are no longer abstract possibilities. They are real major threats requiring real, major safeguards.

The awareness of security has since September 11 events increased in many ways - increased concerned over physical sites, increased concerns of securing networked infrastructure and changes in corporate attitude from being confident about their organization’s security and delaying spending on security, to seeing IT security as an essential capital investment.

Surveys indicate an increase in external, as well as internal, attacks on information systems. The question is not if an organization’s system and business critical assets will be compromised, but when. We have already seemed numerous examples of viruses and worms.

Systems, data and personal information will come under attack. Every day, companies like EDS are discovering seven to ten vulnerabilities in systems around the world.

Tomorrow it will be web defacements, semantic attacks, domain name server (DNS) attacks, distributed denial service (DDoS) attacks, routing systems and infrastructure attacks. These are hidden weak spots attackers and cyber criminals use to get our information assents. What was secure yesterday simply does not hold up today.

In addition to direct financial loss, the loss of reputation and trust cause real long term damage.

Companies have been facing real network related challenges in the regular course of business. Now, we add terrorist attacks to that list and government and private business have begin to think about vulnerability of the computer systems and networks that support critical infrastructures.

Society’ vital services and critical infrastructure: communications, finance, transportation, and utilities such as electricity, oil, gas and water rely on computer and computer networked.

If these networked are damaged the nation will be disrupt. Governments as well as business that own and operate banks, utility infrastructure, transportation systems, telecommunications networks and other critical systems, must be prepared for the possibility of a destructive attack in cyberspace.

The cyber threat is out there, either directly or as collateral damage in other kinds of attacks.
Cyber terrorism