Early indications suggest that terrorist groups may use the Internet more to influence public perception and coordinate their activities than to launch highly destructive and disruptive attacks. An example can be found in the struggle between Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the government of Mexico. The Zapatistas and their supporters have used the Internet to spread word about their situation and to coordinate activities. One group of New York supporters, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) organized an attack against Mexican President Zedillo‘s Web site. On April 10, 1998, participants in the attack pointed their web browsers to a site with FloodNet software, which bombarded the site with traffic.
On September 9, 1998, EDT once again struck the Web site of President Zedillo, along with those of the Pentagon and the Frankfurt Stock exchange. The Net strike was launched in conjunction with the Arts Electronic Festival in Infowar, held in Liz, Austria. According to Brett Stalbaum, author of the FloodNet software used in the attack, the Pentagon was chosen because —we believe that the US military trained the soldiers carrying out the human rights abuses.“ Stalbaum said the Frankfurt Stock Exchange was chosen because is represented globalization, which was at the root of the Chiapas‘ problems. EDT estimated that up to 10,000 people participated in the demonstration delivering 600,000 hits per minute to each of the three sites. The Web servers operated by the Pentagon and the Mexican government struck back. When they sensed an attack from the FloodNet servers, they launched a counter-offensive against the users‘ browsers, in some cases forcing the protestors to reboot their computers. The Frankfurt stock Exchange reported that they normally get 6 million hits a day and that services appeared unaffected.“
Although this may be more of an example of hacktivism on the part of the EDT, it shows how a terrorist organization can use the Internet to broadcast their message and misdirect or misinform the general population in multiple nations simultaneously.
Another form of cyber terrorism is known as "cybotage" which includes acts of disruption and destruction against information infrastructures by terrorists who learn the skills of cyber attack. Although most experts still believe that terrorism will continue to focus on lethal, destructive acts, there is also the belief that some terrorist will stress disruption over destruction. These networked terrorists will no doubt continue to destroy
things and kill people, but their principal strategy may move toward the nonlethal end of the spectrum, where command and control nodes and vulnerable information infrastructures provide rich sets of targets
Whether cyber terrorism in the future is used more as a means to influence public perception or as a forum to conduct politically motivated network attacks, most experts agree that terrorist groups will increase their use of computers to intimidate and coerce societies and governments.
Before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Clark Staten, executive director of the Emergency Response and Research Institute (ERRI) in Chicago, testified that it was believed that ”members of some Islamic extremist organizations have been attempting to develop a ”hacker network‘ to support their computer activities and even engage in offensive information warfare attacks in the future.
The increased threat of cyber terrorism by sub state or state sponsored actors against the US national infrastructure will require the US to identify and retaliate against cyber terrorist attacks in order to deter and prevent future attacks.
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