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Essay on Cyber Terrorism
Why would a terrorist decide to use the Internet, rather than using the usual methods of assassination, hostage taking and guerrilla warfare? Part of the problem is that terrorist may come to realize that removing one official from office only causes another to take the officials place, which may not cause the result the terrorist wished to achieve. By using the internet the terrorist can affect much wider damage or change to a country than one could by killing some people. From disabling countries military defenses to shutting off the power in a large area, the terrorist can affect more people at less risk to him or herself, than through other means.
“Cyber terrorism takes many forms” (Verton, 2003). One of the more popular is to threaten a large bank. The terrorists hack into the system and then leave an encrypted message for senior directors, which threaten the bank. In essence, the message says that if they do not pay a set amount of money, then the terrorists will use anything from logic bombs to electromagnetic pulses and high-emission radio frequency guns to destroy the banks files. What adds to the difficulty to catch the criminals is that the criminals may be in another country. A second difficulty is that most banks would rather pay the money than have the public know how vulnerable they are.
The FBI defines terrorism as the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. “Cyber-terrorism could thus be defined as the use of computing resources to intimidate or coerce others” (Howard, 2003). An example of cyber-terrorism could be hacking into a hospital computer system and changing someone's medicine prescription to a lethal dosage as an act of revenge. It sounds far fetched, but these things can and do happen....
