cyber-"terrorism"?

[iriXx]

On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 08:21, Peter Sommer wrote:

> One of the main problems is the mobility of the term "terrorism", even 
> before we get on to "cyber-terrorism".  

absolutely. this is a key question i am addressing - the use of the term
'terrorism' is out of proportion at present, i believe, and deliberately
used by the M$, the Bush administration, etc. for propogandist effect...
(and it sure has been working - there was an article in 'computing' mag.
last week about businesses in the UK concerned about cyber-attacks -
branding this as cyber-terrorism...) 

> And, depending on what you wanted to achieve and your precise methodology, 
> you would get quite wide range of answers.  For example:
>     * an attack on a website, either a defacement or a DoS,  might, if done 
> intelligently and wittily,  provide effective propaganda

yes - and this has already been the case - for example the many
Brazilian protest defacements (this dates from when the 'defaced' list
was operating on attrition.org so its a couple of years old)... 

it seems now that people who deface a website for political effect are
now being labelled 'cyber terrorists'... which is, i feel, very much out
of proportion to what they are doing - if replacing index.html is
terrorism then what isnt?... is doing my job as a web designer then
cyber terrorism? ;-)... 

>     * a concerted attack on the world financial infrastructure would have a 
> high probability of failure, among other reasons,  because it would take a 
> long time to collect the intelligence required to by-pass the diverse 
> security mechanisms and  hit all the disaster and stand-by facilities that 
> are in place, much of the infrastructure is proprietary and not connected 
> to the Internet - and in any event there are very few ideological groups 
> that would wish to cope with a world where the financial infrastructure has 
> wholly collapsed


this is what i had expected. it would be too complex to achieve... yet
there is a fair bit of propoganda floating around in the news regarding
this possibility.... 

> For the reasonably rational "terrorist" there has to be matching of: 
> ideology, aims, technical capability, resource required to achieve a given 
> result,  exposure to risk - and probably several other factors as 
> well.    And different terrorist organisations have different world views 
> in terms of motivation and willingness to self-sacrifice.
> 
> All of which seem to me good reasons to use the phrase "cyber-terrorism" 
> rarely and occasionally.

indeed.

thanks very much,

bw
miriam
 
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