Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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Conclusion
FULL VPN
As communication and exchange between members of a terrorist cell or organization 
is crucial, some existing devices can be leveraged to better enforce anonymity. For 
instance by having a full VPN service across the members and having all communi-
cations going through this VPN central point.
Nowadays devices such as NAS (Network Attached Storage) are now providing 
a number of additional services which are easy to install on top of providing stor-
age. We can imagine having such a NAS installed in a safe or unsuspected location 
or in a nursing place with a broadband ADSL access. If sufficient trust is placed by 
a terrorist organization on the NAS device, this device can be configured to enable 
VPN only communications, and through this channel provide additional dedicated 
VoIP (Voice over IP) telephony, email servers, web server, video server, file sharing/
storage, any other kind of application needed by the cell and/or group to function and 
prepare an attack.
This has the advantage of being accessible not only by laptops and workstations 
but also by smartphones that are all now supporting VPN functionalities. This allows 
the cell/group members to use the different services without having to actually do 
a real phone call or exchange of information outside the VPN and thus they remain 
undetectable.
From this perspective, it is quite difficult to identify that a particular VPN connec-
tion is used by a terrorist group/cell. In a case where it is identified, it would then be 
difficult to access the content of the exchange over the encryption implementation via 
electronic surveillance. Lastly, if the end-points are used solely for VPN communica-
tions, it adds a difficulty in identifying the people who are connecting to the NAS.
Unless, one or several of those members make some mistakes that can lead to 
identify them via electronic surveillance; Law Enforcement have to use more tradi-
tional investigation methods to identify the terrorist group.
CONCLUSION
As of today and seen in this chapter, terrorist organizations use the Internet mainly 
for spreading their ideas and communicating. However, as technology develops, the 
availability of a variety of offerings in the underground market, and the decreasing 
skills required to perform cyber-attacks will certainly attract those groups to leverage 
their traditional attacks into cyber ones.
We have seen that a CyberTerrorist-like attack is already possible but not yet in 
the reach of terrorist organizations which remains at the level of state-sponsored 
teams or capabilities. Though still very expansive and requiring a lot of expertise and 
resources, this will undoubtedly be in the reach of terrorists in a few years.
Also seen in this chapter, criminals are early adopters of new technologies not 
only to exploit those technologies to their advantages but also to keep ahead of law 
enforcement and regulations. Nevertheless, terrorist groups are more careful and will 
rather seek proven technologies or mimic existing one by developing their own.

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