Cyberterrorism

Cyberterrorism is defined as” the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change” through the use of online activity. Johnalan Brickley in his article in the CTC (Combating Terrorism Centre) Sentinel, quoted Bruce Hoffman who is the author of the above definition for Cyberterrorism, that this definition can be further expanded “to conduct, enabling, disruptive and destructive militant operations in Cyberspace to create fear among people”.

According to Ekran Systems blog of July 2016”Cyberterrorism has become a serious issue for all government and public/private organisations. From looking at the statistics, it can be clearly seen that data breaches are extremely common. Globally I in 4 companies have been hit by data breaches in 2017. Ransomware has also been a major factor in the Cybersecurity landscape. Ransomware is basically a type of malicious software from crypt virology that threatens to publish the victim’s data or perpetually block their access to it until a sum of money or a ransom is paid to the aggressor. The amount of damage done is shocking. !393 data breaches were responsible for exposing more than 174Million confidential records in USA. The cost of these data breaches have increased across many different industries such as healthcare 7%, Finance 10.9% and technological industries 13.8% By 2021`the cost of Cyber-crime is expected to reach 6 Trillion Dollars annually. Malicious attacks insiders in organisations are the most costly. In 2016 insiders were responsible for 55% of all cyber-attacks. According to a global economic survey in 2016, only 37% of companies have an incident plan in place to to combat the threat of Cyber-attack. 80% of businesses believe that they will be affected by Cyber-crime in 2018. 69% of small and medium sized companies do not have sufficient financial resources to defend themselves against cyber security threats.

When ordinary people think of cyber-attacks, they are mostly concerned about personal bank and password details and do not think of conventional terrorist attacks. They picture a terrorist attack as consisting of a bombing or shooting event rather than a data cyber breach. Terrorists seek to cause mental anguish as well as physical destruction and research shows that the psychological effects of cyberterrorism can match the effects of traditional terrorist activity. From studying cyberterrorism, I believe Cyber-attacks by terrorists can achieve the same goal as conventional terrorism and if people or organisations do not take appropriate measures against cyber-attacks, society will suffer significant harm