Cyber Terrorism
Technological innovations bring with them various blessing as well as curses. Due to increased dependency on technology, the negative and exploitative use of technology results in chaos in the daily lives of millions of technologically driven people worldwide. This increased dependency has resulted in the creation of cyber terrorism, whose main purpose is to use technology and cyberspace to launch wide scale and damaging results for the internet users. These opportunities for cyber terrorism are created due to the fact that the reliance on technology and information has increased manifold and this technology and information can be easily manipulated and tampered to hurt and damage the companies’ and nations’ reputations etc. That why, cyber terrorism is considered to be a national offense because it is generally used to disrupt or influence the government and government owned companies regarding their political, social and policy making motives.
Nature of Cyber Terrorism: Cyber terrorism, like conventional terrorism, is used to disrupt and induce fear in the daily lives of people and uses threats, serious assaults to induce fear. Cyber terrorism also works it the similar way, but uses internet and computers as its backbone. Nowadays, terrorist groups and individuals use internet to spread malicious rumours, spread daunting and formidable news and information and post scary images to threat the supremacy of the government and government affiliated individuals and to scare general public.
Cyber terrorism and the activities: The tactics which are used by cyber terrorists generally include insurgency, paper terrorism, internet suicides, internet bombing, proxy bombing, aircraft hijacking, and propagandas.
Some instances of Cyber Terrorism: Public’s fear of cyber terrorism and government’s regulations regarding this form of terrorism ignited after the September, 2011 attacks in United States of America. The Ukrainian President’s personal website was also hacked by a group of youth militants in 2007. In 1990s, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s systems were also hacked.
International Responses to cyber terrorism: Countries now realize the damaging potential of cyber terrorism. Therefore; most of the states have put in practice cyberspace task forces. The job of such cyberspace task forces is to monitor cyberspace activities and spot and diminish fishy activities on the spot. The US has put into action the United States Strategic Command, Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations and Air Force Cyber Command to combat cyber terrorism. Some countries have also put death penalties for groups who indulge in cyber terrorism.