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