Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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Future developments
In February 2013, the Global Islamic Media Front released a new encryption tool 
“Asrar al-Dardashah” but this time as a plugin to instant messaging client Pidgin that 
can be used in conjunction with user accounts on popular platforms such as Google 
Talk, MSN, Yahoo, AOL Instant Messenger, and Jabber/XMPP.
Though it can be seen as a shift in strategy for the use of Internet by implementing an 
encryption layer on top of existing services, the main disadvantage is that Public Keys 
have a very explicit heading 
“
#—Begin Al-Ekhlaas Network ASRAR El Moujahedeen 
V2.0 Public Key 2048 bit—” leading to increased difficulty to store keys on public 
server or exchange those keys without raising the attention of counter-terrorism units.
The very same group, Global Islamic Media Front, also released an Android ap-
plication to send/receive encrypted SMS and files. Indeed, this tool cannot be down-
loaded directly from the official store but is available on their website and a tutorial 
is available for the would-be users.
Finally in December 2013, a new tool has been discovered and was released 
by Al-Fajr Media Centre. This encryption tool is the latest program available for 
Al-Qaeda-type terrorists and codenamed “Amn al-Mujahid” (secret of the Mujahid). 
It’s a software like PGP giving the possibility for users to choose among a set of well 
know encryption algorithm and to generate key pairs.
FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
CYBER TERRORISM
We can imagine in the near future that terrorist and/or associated type of groups will 
want to leverage their attacks to be able to attain an unprecedented scale of impact 
of fear and destruction. With this in mind, the Internet can clearly be used as a tool 
to directly sustain a major attack. The most obvious target will certainly be critical 
infrastructure systems where disruption can be life-threatening and/or having mass 
disruption whilst generating distrust from the wider population (e.g., a transportation 
system hack). It is quite difficult to assess if terrorist groups are close to perform-
ing such attacks. However, if traditional terrorist groups are willing to, it means that 
they will have to either recruit very knowledgeable individuals or ask for external 
help such as for purchasing particular skills via a platform such a CaaS (Crime as a 
Service) or individuals such as Hackers-for-Hire.
However, as previously mentioned, trust is the biggest issue and the amount of 
time requested to develop this type of attack can be quite significant. Also informa-
tion leakage about an operation cannot be ignored. The attack would also need to 
be built (e.g., software development, etc.) and tested. The problem with testing is 
either it is performed “off-line” or out of the target system. In the “off-line” option, it 
requires reconnaissance/intelligence first but also enormous resources to reproduce 
the target system and most of the time this is impossible (e.g., SCADA systems). The 
second problem with testing, if done on the live system, is that it leaves noises (e.g., 
traces/logs) that can raise the attention of the targeted system monitoring capabilities. 
This option is too risky and very unlikely to be chosen by terrorist groups.

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