This book is a cyber terrorism brief that outlines many of the recent terrorist activities, political objectives, and their use of cyberspace. Much of this book is dedicated to illustrating the use of the global information infrastructure by terrorists for the communication and coordination of distributed terrorist cells, the gathering of target intelligence, and the use of cyber criminal activities as a force multiplier for both physical attacks and infrastructure destabilization. This book identifies the underlying technologies of the global information infrastructure as a means for presenting how critical this emerging domain has become. It then discusses the current attack methods and lays out a series of scenarios for key industry sectors. Lastly, Cyber Terrorism: Political and Economic Implications puts forward prevention and response policies for reducing cyber terrorism activities in the context of traditional information security objectives.
People and systems are vulnerable to the methods and processes they employ to get things done. This is because they learn to trust their underlying successes and apply this trust to future applications of their approach. There is a clear link between the elimination of trust and the instillment of fear. It has been proposed that the attacks of September 11th in 2001 (i.e., when the World Trade Towers were destroyed, the Pentagon was damaged, the flight over Pennsylvania was downed, and thousands perished) occurred as a result of asymmetric thinking on the part of the terrorist group al Qaeda.