Cyber Securities And Cyber Terrorism ##BEST##
The Cybersecurity programme aims to enhance capacities of Member States and private organizations in preventing cyber-attacks carried out by terrorist actors against critical infrastructure. Photo: UNOCT stock photo
Cyber securities and Cyber Terrorism
In particular, the Cybersecurity and New Technologies programme aims to enhance capacities of Member States and private organizations in preventing cyber-attacks carried out by terrorist actors against critical infrastructure. The project programme also seeks to mitigate the impact and recover and restore the targeted systems should such cyber-attacks occur.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) leads the national effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure. The agency connects its stakeholders in industry and government to each other and to resources, analyses, and tools to help them fortify their cyber, communications, and physical security and resilience, which strengthens the cybersecurity posture of the nation.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement - Homeland Security Investigations (ICE HSI) is a worldwide law enforcement leader in dark net and other cyber-related criminal investigations. HSI's Cyber Crimes Center (C3) delivers computer-based technical services to support domestic and international investigations into cross-border crime. C3's Child Exploitation Investigations Unit (CEIU) is a powerful tool in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children; the production, advertisement and distribution of child pornography; and child sex tourism.
The Office of Policy is leading the whole of federal government effort to coordinate, de-conflict, and harmonize cyber incident reporting requirements through the Cyber Incident Reporting Council. Established under the bipartisan Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act, the Council brings together federal departments and independent regulators. Through the Council, the Office of Policy is extensively engaging with private sector stakeholders to ensure that we hear from the stakeholders themselves who will benefit from streamlined reporting requirements to ensure greater quality, quantity, and timeliness.
Too much of software, including critical software, is shipped with significant vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyber criminals. The Federal Government will use its purchasing power to drive the market to build security into all software from the ground up.
Cyberterrorism is often defined as any premeditated, politically motivated attack against information systems, programs and data that threatens violence or results in violence. The definition is sometimes expanded to include any cyber attack that intimidates or generates fear in the target population. Attackers often do this by damaging or disrupting critical infrastructure.
Various security organizations view cyberterrorism and the parties involved differently. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines cyberterrorism as any "premeditated, politically motivated attack against information, computer systems, computer programs and data, which results in violence against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents."
The FBI views a cyberterrorist attack as different from a common virus or denial of service (DoS) attack. According to the FBI, a cyberterrorist attack is a type of cybercrime explicitly designed to cause physical harm. However, there is no consensus among governments and the information security community on what qualifies as an act of cyberterrorism.
Other organizations and experts have said that less harmful attacks can be considered acts of cyberterrorism. When attacks are intended to be disruptive or to further the attackers' political agenda, they can qualify as cyberterrorism, according to these other groups. In some cases, the differentiation between cyberterrorism attacks and ordinary cybercrime lies in the intention: The primary motivation for cyberterrorism attacks is to disrupt or harm the victims, even if the attacks do not result in physical harm or cause extreme financial harm.
In other cases, the differentiation is tied to the outcome of a cyber attack. Many cybersecurity experts believe an incident should be considered cyberterrorism if it results in physical harm or loss of life. This can be either direct or indirect harm through damage to or disruption of critical infrastructure.
Physical harm is not always considered a prerequisite for classifying a cyber attack as a terrorist event. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, has defined cyberterrorism as a cyber attack that uses or exploits computer or communication networks to cause "sufficient destruction or disruption to generate fear or to intimidate a society into an ideological goal."
According to the U.S. Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, possible cyberterrorist targets include the banking industry, military installations, power plants, air traffic control centers and water systems.
The intention of cyberterrorist groups is to cause mass chaos, disrupt critical infrastructure, support political activism or hacktivism, or inflict physical damage and even loss of life. Cyberterrorism actors use various methods. These include the following types of attacks:
The threat of cyberterrorism is greater than ever. In 2021, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research group, identified 118 significant cyber attacks that either occurred during that time or were acknowledged to have occurred earlier. Significant attacks, as the CSIS defines them, include those that target government agencies, defense and high-tech companies, as well as economic crimes with losses over $1 million.
The National Cyber Security Alliance is a public-private partnership to promote cybersecurity awareness. It recommends training employees on safety protocols and how to detect a cyber attack and malicious code. The Department of Homeland Security coordinates with other public sector agencies and private sector partners. It shares information on potential terrorist activity and how to protect national security, as well as counterterrorism measures.
On a global level, 66 countries, including the United States, participate in the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime. It seeks to harmonize international laws, improve investigation and detection capabilities, and promote international cooperation to stop cyberwarfare.
Cyberterrorism is the use of the Internet to conduct violent acts that result in, or threaten, the loss of life or significant bodily harm, in order to achieve political or ideological gains through threat or intimidation. Acts of deliberate, large-scale disruption of computer networks, especially of personal computers attached to the Internet by means of tools such as computer viruses, computer worms, phishing, malicious software, hardware methods, programming scripts can all be forms of internet terrorism.[1] Cyberterrorism is a controversial term.[citation needed] Some authors opt for a very narrow definition, relating to deployment by known terrorist organizations of disruption attacks against information systems for the primary purpose of creating alarm, panic, or physical disruption. Other authors prefer a broader definition, which includes cybercrime. Participating in a cyberattack affects the terror threat perception, even if it isn't done with a violent approach.[2] By some definitions, it might be difficult to distinguish which instances of online activities are cyberterrorism or cybercrime.[3]
Cyberterrorism can be also defined as the intentional use of computers, networks, and public internet to cause destruction and harm for personal objectives. Experienced cyberterrorists, who are very skilled in terms of hacking can cause massive damage to government systems and might leave a country in fear of further attacks.[4] The objectives of such terrorists may be political or ideological since this can be considered a form of terror.[5]
There is much concern from government and media sources about potential damage that could be caused by cyberterrorism, and this has prompted efforts by government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to put an end to cyber attacks and cyberterrorism.[4]
There have been several major and minor instances of cyberterrorism. Al-Qaeda utilized the internet to communicate with supporters and even to recruit new members.[6] Estonia, a Baltic country which is constantly evolving in terms of technology, became a battleground for cyberterrorism in April 2007 after disputes regarding the relocation of a WWII soviet statue located in Estonia's capital Tallinn.[3]
There is debate over the basic definition of the scope of cyberterrorism. These definitions can be narrow such as the use of Internet to attack other systems in the Internet that result to violence against persons or property.[7] They can also be broad, those that include any form of Internet usage by terrorists to conventional attacks on information technology infrastructures.[7] There is variation in qualification by motivation, targets, methods, and centrality of computer use in the act. U.S. government agencies also use varying definitions and that none of these have so far attempted to introduce a standard that is binding outside of their sphere of influence.[8]
Depending on context, cyberterrorism may overlap considerably with cybercrime, cyberwar or ordinary terrorism.[9] Eugene Kaspersky, founder of Kaspersky Lab, now feels that "cyberterrorism" is a more accurate term than "cyberwar". He states that "with today's attacks, you are clueless about who did it or when they will strike again. It's not cyber-war, but cyberterrorism."[10] He also equates large-scale cyber weapons, such as the Flame Virus and NetTraveler Virus which his company discovered, to biological weapons, claiming that in an interconnected world, they have the potential to be equally destructive.[10][11] 041b061a72