Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 10
Terrorist use of the internet
that deals with dangerous materials, or are well positioned in organization and are 
turned into Lone Wolves to perform a one-shot attack using their expert knowledge. 
The most known case to date is certainly the Ivins case and the bioterrorism Anthrax 
attacks in 2001 (named Amerithrax).
Motivation for the lone wolf can be twofold:
• Internal or self-motivator: Disgruntled and with the adoption of an ideology and 
involve a nervous breakdown or mental health issue.
• External influence: Target of social engineering and then indoctrinated.
INFORMATION SHARING
Initially, Al-Qaeda type groups were reported as using Steganography to hide mes-
sages in pictures and/or movies. Though Steganography is an obfuscation method 
and cannot be considered as an encryption technology, it serves the purpose of hiding 
a message from plain sight which in turn ensures relative privacy and is one of the 
aims of encryption. This Modus Operandi was highly probable but has never really 
been proven to be widely used. The size of the information that can be hidden in a 
picture is very limited as, for instance, it would be very suspicious to have a poor 
quality picture consisting of a high number of Mega Bites.
After the train bombings in Madrid on March 11th, 2006, the arrested suspects 
revealed that they were using a trick to avoid email surveillance detection. The con-
cept was to have one single email account (such as Hotmail, Yahoo!) shared among 
the group members where they could write emails and then leave them in the Draft 
folder. In doing so, no traces were left since no emails where sent. Nowadays, this 
technique is less likely since the trick is now well known and having one single ac-
count accessed from several diverse locations at the same time or from very distant 
geographical locations within small amount of time will certainly raise alerts to the 
mail provider that a particular account is shared among several persons.
In the past, Al-Qaeda type terror groups have been attempting to use some encryp-
tion technologies too. However, mistrust in ready-to-use tools such as PGP which 
was privately developed or TrueCrypt which was a community-developed open-
source tool and potential backdoors placed by governments, did not provide them 
total insurance of confidentiality protection. Hence, they decided to develop their 
own tool “Mujahideen Secrets” (or “Asrar al-Mujahedeen”) and later on Mujahideen 
Secrets 2. The first release was made by the Global Islamic Media Front in 2007 and 
quickly followed by the second version in 2008.
Of course, having their own tool has some advantages like better trust in its use 
but certainly brought more disadvantages. As such having a proprietary tool not thor-
oughly tested by a wider community makes it more prone to vulnerabilities. Once 
known, this tool was also the main target for reverse engineering from the different 
counter terrorism intelligence and law enforcement departments across the globe. 
Lastly, the possession of such a tool gives additional indications that a person is po-
tentially pertaining to a terrorist group or is linked to it in some way.

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