Ambreen Shabbir

Cyber Terrorism and Warfare With the technology persistently advancing and the world becoming a global village, the dynamics of warfare have also transformed and a unique and unprecedented battlefield has emerged which is the most neglected one in current times. The battlefield i.e. Cyber terrorism and warfare has not been cognized as a battlefield yet despite the many incidents happened across the globe. Although governments of different states have chalked their policy on cybercrimes, still the issue is not being taken in proportion to its gravity. There is the need to address this issue and there are a few enterprises which can prove to be useful, all establishment has to do is to select the best possible ones. However, the first step still remains to consider it as a new battlefield. What is Cyber Terrorism? The term can be defined as deliberate, politically motivated attacks carried out by sub-national clandestine individuals or groups on the information and systems, programs, and data which can lead to the suffering of non-combatant targets. What is it capable of? The issue of vulnerability of information and the chances of its misuse have become more intense because of the unprecedented emergence of sub-state and non-state actors at the international arena and their access to technology. In the realm of Information Technology, the terrorists are not only those recognized by the international community but they can be anyone, whether they are politically motivated, anti-world trade, anti-governments, or any kind of extremists. These terrorists are capable of taking extortion to another level. They have the potential to interfere with the resources controlling critical national infrastructures through manipulation of IT in order to fulfill their goals. Even they have several options for this purpose owing to the proliferation of technology and they would also select the best possible ones so states are left with nothing but to do the same. Intentions Behind Cyber Terrorism Before planning and developing protection against cyber terrorism it is important to know what can be the motive behind such acts. Understanding is the first step in reducing or exterminating any kind of attacks. The most likely motives behind cyber terrorism are: Fear: As the word, ‘terrorism’ implies the main purpose behind any kind of terrorist act is to terrorize people or to spread fear. This is the main objective because it makes the terrorist elements to get recognized among the general public and when people are afraid, the governments are easy to bend. Gross: Just like other terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks are always gross. Grosser they are, more negative publicity there will be. Vulnerability: Cyber-attacks do not always incur financial casualty rather they also aim to depict the vulnerability of an organization or institution. The state institutions in this regard are quite relevant here because, when websites of these institutions are denied access to the concerned personnel, this can create uncertainty among the public. Pursuance of specific goals: In order to break the governments to fulfill the terrorist’s demands or to fulfill their own specified goals, cyber-attacks are carried out. Incidents of Cyber Terrorism As the matter of fact, the aforementioned scenario has happened actually and many times as well. It is worth mentioning here that the cyber-attacks are always targeted at something representing high publicity value. In the US, these incidents created a clamor and even hacking was claimed to be responsible for the US election results by the FBI. Other incidents which created a lot of tumults are hacking of the website of Department of Navy, a number of banks and much more. Not only the US, but Europe is also facing the challenge of cyber-attacks and it has not remained safe from such attacks in this year at least. EU has been facing cyber-attacks on its servers and all the fingers are being pointed at Russia. A couple of months ago there was an attack on the TV5Monde television channel which almost destroyed due to the attack. The attack was conducted in and the channel had gone off the air in April 2015, and was linked to Islamic State; however, later investigation revealed that the attack was perpetrated by a group of Russian hackers. The attack was so powerful that it was capable of destroying the TV network’s systems. Even now it is being alleged that the hackers most likely to be Russian are meddling with the French elections. Lately, hacks were carried out against a mammoth of Twitter accounts including that of Forbes and Bieber, calling Netherlands and Germany ‘Nazi’. Only in the UK, there have been 188 high-level cyber-attacks occurred in past three months. All these attacks were carried out on high profile websites including the attack aimed to steal defense foreign policy secrets of the country. Also, there have been 34,550 attacks which have been blocked by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Allegedly, Russia has changed its policy of online aggression and as a part of this change, there have been many attacks on the political institutions and the parties. Fighting the battle The data above verifies the newly emergent battle, so now it is time to gather weapons in order to fight it. As the battle is in cyberspace, the conventional weapons are not going to help here. There is a need for a technological answer to this problem. In fact, there are more than one answers to this problem and there is the only one which is the best. We have to select the best possible ones from these answers. The answer, the useful weapon, and the partner in this battle are Niagara Networks. Niagara Networks has all answers to the problems pertaining to cyber-security. It handles the security solutions, monitoring, performance management, and other data network services by converting the standard visibility layer into an enhanced visibility adaptation layer. It essentially provides the visibility into traffic which is very crucial in preventing the attacks. It also provides TAPs, bypass elements, packet brokers, and a unified management layer. Now the choice is yours, it is you who has to decide and select the best possible ones.