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• US national infrastructure protection centre (2001) has defined cyber terrorism as:
“A criminal act perpetrated by the use of computers and telecommunications capabilities, resulting in violence, destruction and/or disruption of services, where the intended purpose is to create fear by causing confusion and uncertainty within a given population, with the goal of influencing a government or population to conform to a particular political, social or ideological agenda.”
• Use of computers, internet and information gateways to support traditional terrorism.
• Targets may include power plants, military installations, the banking industry, air traffic control centers, water systems, and other major centers affecting the lives and well-being of many people and companies.
• Difficulty Identifying Attackers: It remains difficult to determine the identity of the initiators of most cyber attacks.
• Lack of Boundaries: Attacks can originate from anywhere in the world and from multiple locations simultaneously.
• Speed of Development: The time between the discovery of a new vulnerability and the emergence of a new tool or technique that exploits the vulnerability is getting shorter.
• Low Cost of Tools: The technology employed in attacks is simple to use, inexpensive, and widely available.
• Automated Methods: The methods of attack have become automated and more sophisticated, resulting in greater damage from a single attack.
(d) Logic Bomb: A piece of code intentionally inserted into a software system that will set off a malicious function when specified conditions are met.
(e)Trap Doors: A method of gaining access to some part of a system other than by the normal procedure.
(f)Denial of Service: The attacker sends almost innumerable requests for information/e-mail that cause a computer systems to crash.
(g) Use of Cryptography and Steganography: to aid terrorism
Cryptography: Information is transformed into unreadable format (cipher text). Only those who possess a secret key can decipher (or decrypt) the message into plain text.
Steganography: Writing hidden messages in a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message.
Al Qaeda Terrorist used the Internet to plan the September11,
2001 operations upon new York City and Washington D.C.
They used a special internet chat software for communication.
A nuclear power plant in Iran was attacked by the Stuxnet worm. The worm installed itself in the plant’s PLC (Programming Logic Controller) computer-controlled system and caused a change in the rotational speed of machinery. The increased speed without the usual automated shut-down controls caused the nuclear plant fusion center to spin uncontrollably and explode.
The Government of India has put in place some mechanisms to counter the threat of cyber terrorism.
• Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In): a functional organization of the department of Information Technology with the objective of securing Indian cyber space.
• National Cyber Security Assurance Framework is established by the CERT-In for protection of Critical Information.
• The Information Technology Act, 2000 and IT (Amendment) Act 2008.