Cyber Terrorism and Cyber Warfare: Threats and Countermeasures

This essay explores the growing threat of cyber terrorism and cyber warfare, focusing on the violent use of cyberspace by non-state actors. It discusses various examples of cyber attacks and the methods employed by cyber terrorists, including phishing, ransomware, and denial-of-service attacks. The essay also examines the responses of states and international organizations like the United Nations and the Council of Europe, emphasizing the importance of multilateral cooperation and the establishment of international norms and policies. Furthermore, it offers recommendations for mitigating cybersecurity threats, such as strengthening digital architecture, implementing robust security measures, and fostering collaboration between governments and organizations. Desklib provides access to this document, along with a wealth of study resources, including past papers and solved assignments to support students in their academic endeavors.

Cyber terrorism and Cyber warfare
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Introduction
The society utilises the technology for enhancing their life and the lifecycle. However,
some people use the technology for meeting their selfish needs. This can be alarming for the
society. Hacking has become the tool that is creating a new kind of cyber threat. The threat
occurs mainly in two ways- pure cyber terrorism and hybrid cyber terrorism. The pure cyber
terrorism is one sort of attack that affects the cyberinfrastructure of the victim. In case of
hybrid cyber terrorism, the Internet is used to recruit and encourage others to the acts of
terrorism. Both of these threats pose a serious threat to the United Nation, Organisation of
Islamic Cooperation and Council of Europe.
The essay states about violent, non-state actor use of cyberspace. The Council of
Europe, United Nation faces several challenges for ensuring security against cyberattack.
Recommendations have been made in the essay by which the cybersecurity threats can be
mitigated.
Violent, non-state actor use of cyberspace
By analysing the current trends, it can be seen that the society is increasingly
depending upon information technology. The people are now using computer technology to
meet their selfish needs. The cyber terrorism has gained prominence over the last few years1.
Cyber terrorism is generally pre-mediated and politically motivated attacks and is conducted
by some notorious criminals. They attack one’s computer through information system and
make their system vulnerable to use. The cyber terrorism is somewhat related to hacktivism.
The cyber terrorists attack the system for meeting their selfish needs whereas the hackers
attack the system to gain financially. There are several scenarios where the cyberterrorism,
1 Bendersky, Corinne, and Catherine H. Tinsley. "Finding Cyber Terrorists: The Influence of Status on Inter-
agency Counter Terrorism Taskforces." (2015).

cybercrime and the hacktivism takes place2. The cyber-dependent attack that takes place can
be a political move as well. The government of a specific country can be negatively affected
due to the cyber terrorism. The authors have stated that several examples where terrorism
takes place3.
Example 1: In the year 1998 a cyber-terrorist group attacked the Sri Lankan
embassies, and they daily sent about 800 emails per day stating they are the Black Tigers and
they are doing it to disrupt the network connections.
Example 2: Another author states attack the Japanese government. The government
uses the software related to Aum Shinrikyo. Aum collected all the sensitive data about the
nuclear weapons.
Example 3: In recent times a Distributed Denial of Service attack occurs and the
attack occurs on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange website, First International Bank of Israel
websites. In the year 2012, a cyber attack occurs against Saudi Arabia’s company. Aramco
destroyed around 35,000 computers, and the same virus attacked RasGas Company of Qatar.
Example 4: The attack of 9/11 Al-Qaeda by was analysed, and it was found that the
terrorists used the email to coordinate their actions.
The terrorists use the off-the-self software to encrypt the messages; the software also
paves the way for transferring files via a peer-to-peer network and torrents. The violent
network helps in the electronic surveillance like the Street View and the Google Earth. They
conduct data mining from the social networking sites to uncover the names and addresses of
the individuals. The violent organisations make use of the tool to raise funds by establishing
2 Gross, Michael L., Daphna Canetti, and Dana R. Vashdi. "The psychological effects of cyber terrorism." Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists 72, no. 5 (2016): 284-291.
3 Salleh, Nurhashikin Mohd, Siti Rahayu Selamat, Robiah Yusof, and Shahrin Sahib. "Discovering Cyber
Terrorism Using Trace Pattern." IJ Network Security 18, no. 6 (2016): 1034-1040.

NGOs and charities. They make use of all these tools to solicit funds. Those fraud
organisations make use of social media to make money. They accept all the donations via
Pay-pal, credit card and bank transfer4. The attackers or the cyber terrorists make use of the
varied multimedia techniques and state-of-art propaganda audio files and video files.
There are several areas of cybercrime that must be taken into consideration. The
hackers conduct the attacks by the following means-
Phishing attack- The phishing attack is generally carried through fraud emails and
users or the victims fall into the trap5. The users provide all the credentials like the
passwords, identity theft and the sensitive data get breached.
Watering hole- a fake webpage is generated to deploy, and the original page is
compromised for a reason.
Ransomware- Ransomware attack is carried out the cybercriminals as well. They
restrict the users to log in their system. The users are restricted to get into their system6. The
users will have to pay a handsome amount of money to get access to their system.
Scanning- The attackers in the name of testing vulnerabilities on the internet deploy
attacks at random fashion.
4 Brill, Alan. "The Use of Internet Technology by Cyber Terrorists & Cyber Criminals: The 2014 Essay." (2015): 1-
14.
5 Droogan, Julian, and Lise Waldek. "Where are All the Cyber Terrorists? From Waiting for Cyber Attack to
Understanding Audiences." In Cybersecurity and Cyberforensics Conference (CCC), 2016, pp. 100-106. IEEE,
2016.
6 Sharma, Aakashdeep, and Narinder Singh. "Cyber terrorism and cyber laws: The challenge for
governments." IAHRW International Journal of Social Sciences Review 2, no. 3 (2015).

Procedures by which the states have responded
Cyber warfare and the terrorism do not have any specific limits and borders. The
main motive of this essay is to share the information related to safety of the modern states,
private organisations and the government organisations. NATO analyse that the cyber-
attacks have become common now-a-days. The cyber threats can be a threat for the
organisations, government administration. There are several phases of cyber security attack.
The first phase attack involves the scouting the potential victims. The cyber attackers gather
vital information from the hardware and the used applications7. The second phase of the
attack involves intrusion. Nothing can be done against the target apart from disrupting the
availability. The third phase involves the identification of the internal opportunities by
assessing the resources to access the restricted parts of the system8. The cyber terrorists
implement malware and virus into one’s system through email and internet browser. They
carry out denial of service attack to restrict the use of the computer system and the network.
They also get into the system of government organisation and steal all the important details.
They also disrupt the operations of the system9. Thus it is a serious problem and that is why it
is challenging for the skilled military cyber units to fight against the cyber terrorism. China,
USA and China have the skilled cyber unit military base. They apply certain norms and
policy and in this way they can assure safety of the system and database. The treaty laws can
be useful; the employees can know how to safeguard data of the organisations. They use the
firewall and other security hardware and software to prevent the cyber security attacks.
7 Gordon, Theodore J., Elizabeth Florescu, and Jerome C. Glenn, eds. Identification of Potential Terrorists and
Adversary Planning: Emerging Technologies and New Counter-terror Strategies. Vol. 132. IOS Press, 2017.
8 Dhaliwal, Sukhmani. "The Future of Cyber Terrorism: Where the Physical and Virtual Worlds
Converge." International Journal of Scientific Research and Management 4, no. 9 (2016).
9 Griffiths, Jordan Luke. "Cyber security as an emerging challenge to South African national security." PhD diss.,
University of Pretoria, 2017.

Treaty laws provide norms for exercising the universal jurisdiction over
cyberterrorism. The universal jurisdiction is controlled by international community and is not
controlled by the states10. The cyber terrorism is the transactional and the trans-border crime.
During the recent times it can be seen that the multilateral cooperation is the most efficient
methodology to respond to the terrorist attack. The United nation has taken the lead to
coordinate and seek cooperation in dealing with the issues related to the terrorism. UN
Security following the tragedy of 9/11 attack has moved forward to fight against terrorism11.
They declared the international peace and at the same time declared obligation to all the
members of the United Nations to support and financing the terrorists. UN Security takes
important steps so that they do not the funds. The United Nations are setting up CTC to
monitor Resolution 1373 implementation12. The United Nations Security requires all the
states to cooperate in the fight against the terrorism. The Resolution 1624 (2005) calls states
to apply the policies to prevent the chance of cyber security attack. The resolutions taken by
the United Nations can take a significant approach to fix the errors related to the
cybersecurity.
Future Recommendation
According to the Law of Treaties declared by Vienna Convention, the parties that are
involved with the project can choose to interpret the sources rather than the text of the treaty.
The treaties text can be expanded either implicitly or explicitly to cope up with the rapid
technological changes. The United Nations have published charters on the war and the
10 Zeri, Norshahida Noor, and Noor Nirwandy Mat Noordin. "Framing Cyberterrorism: A Content Analysis of The
New York Times." Journal of Media and Information Warfare Vol 9 (2017): 177-198.
11 Perlin, Jonathan B. "Health information technology interoperability and use for better care and
evidence." Jama316, no. 16 (2016): 1667-1668.
12 Army, U. S. "Cyberterrorism After Stuxnet-Terrorist Cyberattacks, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS),
Motives, Critical US Infrastructure Vulnerabilities, al-Qaeda Computer Capability, PC Attacks." (2017).

terrorism. The United Nations publishes the charters on the terrorism and the war13. The
United Nation establishes laws and conventions related to the cyber terrorism. By following
those norms, they can be able to root out the risks related to the cyber terrorism.
Alongside United nation, the Council of Europe’s European Committee creates an
expert committee on cyberspace14. They created the cybercrime related convention and
convention has been lasted for several years. The conventions are designed in such a way that
the international crimes can be monitored and controlled efficiently15. They have initiated
several norms and the policies by which the cybercrime can be detected and can be mitigated.
The Council of Europe has taken up several measures to prevent the cybercrime
attack. Cyber terrorism is the fast-growing threats prevailing and it is not limited to
individuals only rather it spreads to the public as well as private organisations. It must be
ensured that proper measures are taken to curb the power of the cyber terrorisms16. The
digital architecture must be analysed every time to find out any vulnerabilities within. They
will gain significant benefits if the following questions are answered- What are the cyber
terrorists are wanting to do over here? How can those unethical actions be checked? What are
the productive measures they should take?
13 Lee, Jaehee, Jinhyeok Jeon, Changyeob Lee, Junbeom Lee, and Jaebin Cho. "An implementation of log
visualization system combined SCADA Honeypot." (2016).
14 Akatyev, Nikolay, and Joshua James. "United Nations Digital Blue Helmets as a Starting Point for Cyber
Peacekeeping." In ECCWS 2017 16th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, p. 8. Academic
Conferences and publishing limited, 2017.
15 Awan, Imran. "Debating the Term Cyber-terrorism: issues and problems." Internet Journal of Criminology.
ISSN 2045, no. 6743 (2014): 1-14.
16 Selamat, Siti Rahayu, Nurhashikin Mohd Salleh, Robiah Yusof, and Shahrin Sahib. "Constructing cyber
terrorism trace pattern for forensic investigation process." In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference
on Applied Computer and Applied Computational Science, Recent Advances in Computer Science, pp. 240-245.
2015.

They must act reasonably and must assume the potential threats that have been
informed. The digital architecture tools that are used today are the strong password, firewalls,
key encryption17. IP Sec, intrusion detection system and the Secure Socket Layer are some of
the measures that can be taken18. The United Kingdom’s government must take appropriate
actions towards the Ministry of Defence, Government Communications Headquarters and
Military Intelligence Section19. GCHQ is under National Cyber Security Centre, and it is
primarily established in the year 2017. NATO is also taking tough decisions to handle all the
cyber attacks against the cyber terrorism three months before GCHQ. There is another
organisation called Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure is also working to
mitigate the cyber terrorism20. They intend to enhance their network against the cyberattacks.
According to United Kingdom’s Cyber Security Strategy, the government decides to take
measures against the cybersecurity attacks21.
Preventions as well as mitigation of future attacks
Vulnerabilities in the software show that there are several security flaws in the
technology field and the cyber terrorists are making use of this vulnerability and exploiting
17 Singh, Biny Pal, and Ankit Verma. "Cyber Terrorism-An International Phenomena and An Eminent
Threat." IITM Journal of Management and IT 6, no. 1 (2015): 164-168.
18 Chaturvedi, Manmohan, Aynur Unal, Preeti Aggarwal, Shilpa Bahl, and Sapna Malik. "International
cooperation in cyber space to combat cyber crime and terrorism." In Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century
(21CW), 2014 IEEE Conference on, pp. 1-4. IEEE, 2014.
19 Paul, Shuva, Md Sajed Rabbani, Ripon Kumar Kundu, and Sikdar Mohammad Raihan Zaman. "A review of
smart technology (Smart Grid) and its features." In Non Conventional Energy (ICONCE), 2014 1st International
Conference on, pp. 200-203. IEEE, 2014.
20 Dawson, Maurice, Marwan Omar, and Jonathan Abramson. "Understanding the methods behind cyber
terrorism." In Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition, pp. 1539-1549. IGI Global,
2015.
21 Spence, Shannon, J. Alan Roberson, and Kevin M. Morley. "A Simple Action Plan for Utilities to Secure Their
Process Control Systems." Journal American Water Works Association‐ 106, no. 2 (2014): 23-25.

the network. The Internet of Things devices is being exploited by the cyberterrorists22.
Recently the MIT Slogan Management publish a essay which states that the companies are
not concerned about the security of the devices23. The cyberterrorists can take the advantage,
can exploit the IoT devices and can make those devices vulnerable to use. They can take
away the sensitive information of the employees. They can take away the financial details as
well.
Thus precautions should be taken to prevent the cyber-terrorist works. The
organisations must take necessary steps; they must analyse the risks of the cyber terrorism
and must take necessary steps and actions24. The terrorists do not follow the legislation, and
they do not bother about the identification or the consequences of the attack. They can juts
create harm to the community and the community holders25. The organisations must focus on
developing new intrusion systems to reduce the attack of the of the cyber terrorism26. The
intrusion system must be capable of detecting any cyber-related threat, and the threat must be
mitigated as early as possible. They must ensure that such kind of attack does not harm others
in future. The responses to the cyberattack can be enhanced by focusing more on preserving
data while conducting the attack27. The private companies, the government organisations, can
22 Awan, Jawad, and Shahzad Memon. "Threats of cyber security and challenges for Pakistan." In International
Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, p. 425. Academic Conferences International Limited, 2016.
23 Georgescu, Constantin, and Monica Tudor. "Cyber Terrorism Threats to Critical Infrastructures NATO'S Role
in Cyber Defense." Knowledge Horizons. Economics 7, no. 2 (2015): 115.
24 Lam, Anthony, José Fernandez, and Richard Frank. "Cyberterrorists Bringing Down Airplanes: Will it Happen
Soon?." In ICMLG 2017 5th International Conference on Management Leadership and Governance, p. 210.
Academic Conferences and publishing limited, 2017.
25 Al Mazari, Ali, Ahmed H. Anjariny, Shakeel A. Habib, and Emmanuel Nyakwende. "Cyber terrorism
taxonomies: Definition, targets, patterns, risk factors, and mitigation strategies." International Journal of Cyber
Warfare and Terrorism (IJCWT) 6, no. 1 (2016): 1-12.
26 Yunos, Zahri, Nurul Mohd, Aswami Ariffin, and Rabiah Ahmad. "Understanding Cyber Terrorism From
Motivational Perspectives: A Qualitative Data Analysis." In European Conference on Cyber Warfare and
Security, pp. 550-557. Academic Conferences International Limited, 2017.
27 Stockton, Paul N., and Michele Golabek-Goldman. "Prosecuting Cyberterrorists: Applying Traditional
Jurisdictional Frameworks to a Modern Threat." Stan. L. & Pol'y Rev. 25 (2014): 211.

safeguard their data with the aid of the cybersecurity norms can be able to mitigate the cyber
security threats. They must have installed updated version of the system, they must have the
updated database installed at their premises.
Conclusions
Thus it can be conclude that cyber terrorism is a serious concern and must be taken
into consideration. The cyber terrorism must be mitigated so that everyone can use the
technology ethically and efficiently. The terrorists and their attack can be recognised until
they attack. They hide within the society unless and until they trigger an attack. Every
terrorist have their specific motivation and they can harm both physically and digitally. From
the incidents of cyberattack it can be learnt that by applying suitable methods the terrorist
attack can be traced and this is important for jurisdictions. This government agency must take
the necessary actions like tightening of cybercrime laws, surveillance and developing
technologies to detect intrusions to systems. The cyber terrorism is one of the major concerns
of for the government as well. The security details of a particular country can be threatened.
The trace of the terrorists must be detected as it will ensure safety for the mankind and the
society. The government can take several measures to implement the security features. The
safety measures must be taken to root out the risk of cyber security attack. The cyber
attackers are not concerned about the attack but the victims will have to suffer the
consequences. The government will face heavy losses, their reputation will be at stake, the
country or state’s security can be compromised. Thus a safe barrier must be constructed to
identify the harmful attack of the terrorists and to take necessary actions against the cyber
terrorists. There are several techniques which can be applied to safeguard the system and the
data from the cyber terrorists. Passwords can be used as it is the most convenient method to
detect the intrusions. The organisations must constantly work on mitigating the attack or the

risk caused by cyber terrorists. The private organisations and the government organisations
do not keep backup of the data and file; they should keep backup of the sensitive data and the
files. The enterprises as well as the government organisations with the aid of data mining and
the machine learning can be able to analyse the potential risks. They must adopt some new
technology that will help them to mitigate the risks related to the cyber attacks. Both the
private organisations and the government organisations must be provided training so that they
can use the technology. The systems that are planned to develop to mitigate the threats and
the risks must be capable enough to limit the vulnerabilities.

References
Akatyev, Nikolay, and Joshua James. "United Nations Digital Blue Helmets as a Starting
Point for Cyber Peacekeeping." In ECCWS 2017 16th European Conference on Cyber
Warfare and Security, p. 8. Academic Conferences and publishing limited, 2017.
Al Mazari, Ali, Ahmed H. Anjariny, Shakeel A. Habib, and Emmanuel Nyakwende. "Cyber
terrorism taxonomies: Definition, targets, patterns, risk factors, and mitigation
strategies." International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism (IJCWT) 6, no. 1 (2016):
1-12.
Army, U. S. "Cyberterrorism After Stuxnet-Terrorist Cyberattacks, Distributed Denial of
Service (DDoS), Motives, Critical US Infrastructure Vulnerabilities, al-Qaeda Computer
Capability, PC Attacks." (2017).
Awan, Imran. "Debating the Term Cyber-terrorism: issues and problems." Internet Journal of
Criminology. ISSN 2045, no. 6743 (2014): 1-14.
Awan, Jawad, and Shahzad Memon. "Threats of cyber security and challenges for Pakistan."
In International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, p. 425. Academic Conferences
International Limited, 2016.
Bendersky, Corinne, and Catherine H. Tinsley. "Finding Cyber Terrorists: The Influence of
Status on Inter-agency Counter Terrorism Taskforces." (2015).
Brill, Alan. "The Use of Internet Technology by Cyber Terrorists & Cyber Criminals: The
2014 Essay." (2015): 1-14.