Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 12
Cybercrime classification and characteristics
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CHAPTER
165
13
Cyber terrorism: Case 
studies
Daniel Cohen
INTRODUCTION
If we examine one of the key concepts in cyberspace—namely, dealing with terrorist 
threats—we find the rationale underlying the concept (which emerged, among oth-
ers, after the formative events at the beginning of the twenty-first century, such as 
the Y2K bug and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks) in the world appears to 
be at the peak of a process belonging to the post-modern and post-technology era, 
an era with no defensible borders, in which countries are vulnerable to invasion via 
information, ideas, people, and materials—in short, an open world. In this world, the 
threat of terrorism takes a new form: a terrorist in a remote, faraway basement hav-
ing the potential ability to cause damage completely changing the balance of power 
by penetrating important security or economic systems in each and every country in 
the world and accessing sensitive information, or even by causing the destruction of 
vital systems. No one disputes non-state actors, like terrorist organizations are using 
cyberspace as a field enabling small individual players to have influence dispropor-
tionate to their size. This asymmetry creates various risks that did not attract attention 
or provoke action among the major powers in the past. The question is whether the 
activity of these players in cyberspace constitutes a threat with the potential to cause 
major and widespread damage, with the ability to operate cyber weapons with stra-
tegic significance—weapons that can inflict large scale or lasting damage of the sort 
causing critical systems to collapse and “brings countries to their knees.” And if so, 
why such damage has not yet occurred?
Can the reality of September 11, 2001—when a terrorist organization planned an 
attack for two years, including by taking pilot training courses, eventually using sim-
ple box-cutters to carry out a massive terrorist attack—repeat itself in cyberspace? 
Is a scenario in which a terrorist organization sends a group of terrorists as students 
to the relevant courses in computer science, arms them with technological means ac-
cessible to everyone, and uses them and the capabilities they have acquired to carry 
out a massive terrorist attack in cyberspace realistic or science fiction? In order to 
answer this question, we must examine the few case studies of cyber-attacks by terror 
organization and then consider what capabilities a non-state actor can acquire, and 
whether these capabilities are liable to constitute a real threat to national security.

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