Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 10
Terrorist use of the internet
On the other hand, extremist or activist groups may have a different view of trust 
issues and may not hesitate to call for external help and purchase in the underground 
market the missing skills they need to perpetrate a cyber-attack.
Additionally, if we take the particular case of Hacktivism, it is groups gathering 
extremely skilled and IT savvy individuals who make them more likely to succeed in 
a cyber terrorism attack than the other type of groups mentioned so far.
Taking the example of a successful event, STUXNET, that occurred in 2010. It 
was a very sophisticated code that has been developed to target a SCADA system to 
damage centrifuge machines to slow down Iranian uranium enrichment program (see 
Chapter 3). After reverse engineering the code, it shows that the resources required 
and knowledge of the target needed to successfully complete such an operation were 
massive and seems not in the reach yet of terrorist, extremism, or activist groups and 
can only be coming from state-sponsored or state-run CyberTeams.
FINANCING
The main element for a terrorist group to be able to achieve its attacks is the need of 
funding by partners, sponsors, or peers. States and Law Enforcement communities 
have therefore pushed to have rules, regulations and techniques to detect suspicious 
financial transactions to identify potential individuals participating in terrorist activi-
ties. Considering this, we can take as an example, the US and Europe agreement, 
EU-US TFTP (2010) Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme, signed in August 2010 
in order to deal with that issue. The European Commission is currently studying a 
European agreement, EU TFTS (Terrorist Finance Tracking System). Though, these 
agreements might be relevant and quite efficient, it does not address emerging tech-
nological issues such as the rise of Virtual currencies. Virtual currencies are alterna-
tive currencies neither endorsed nor produced by any government. They can be split 
into two main streams: electronic money from Internet Games like Second Life and 
crypto currencies (or open-source digital currency).
Internet Games-based electronic money could be used to transfer large amount of 
virtual money across individuals and cash them out into real money. However espe-
cially following Snowden's (2013) revelations, these kinds of games have been infil-
trated by the NSA and GCHQ in search of terrorist activity (
Leapman, 2007
). Also, 
individuals playing these games are required to become acquainted with the game 
rules and also how to use the virtual money. For instance they need to know who is 
behind the character and where the money is sent to. Another disadvantage is that the 
type of money is of course tied to the success of the game and its future development.
The second alternative, crypto currency seems more probable and has developed 
quickly in the last 3 to 4 years. Among the multiple currencies available today, Bitcoin 
is leading the way. It consists of a system of payment organized as a peer-2-peer 
network based on public-key cryptography. This tool is increasingly interesting for 
criminals and also terrorists since wallets are to some extent anonymous and depen-
dent of the currency provisions toward privacy and provide facilitated ways to cash-in 
and cash-out the virtual money into hard money without possible tracking through 
financial institutions and therefore current watchdogs developed are inefficient.

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