Hacking is a crime - often a petty crime, malicious or deliberate fraud. Cyberterrorism is an extension of terrorism - a terrorism by other means - and it takes advantage of the fact that our society is increasingly becoming dependent on computer networks and, particularly, dependent on the Internet. Cyberterrorism, as with any other terrorist acts, are acts of carefully planned violence where a small amount of effort, usually hard to identify or catch, is applied to interfere with the functioning of civil society. Cyberterrorism is applied to mostly civilian information infrastructures with the ultimate objectives that are either ideological or political, but mostly political. Cyberterrorism doesn't stand by itself and is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a much larger scheme to undermine the operations of a technologically advanced society and its primary target is likely to be the USA.
There's many ways of judging the severity of such threats but the primary target for cyberterrorism is the Internet. Its most attractive objective is to bring the Internet down, since increasingly, all commerce depends on Internet-based transactions. The cyberterrorism threat is real because we have already experienced experimental acts of cyberterrorism when a large number of Internet-connected computers have ceased to function.
As if to demonstrate the poor reliability of the global web of communications infrastructure that much of the world's commerce relies upon, the telephone line goes dead. After several attempts, a connection is re-established between Singapore and Strassmann's office in New Canaan, Connecticut. Strassmann takes up again where we had been interrupted.
The feasibility of cyberterrorism bringing down the Internet - principally by means of "denial-of-service" attacks - is what I wish to concentrate on in this interview. The technical feasibility has been already demonstrated, at least partially, in a series of attacks like Code Red I, Code Red II, and Nimda [three recent computer virus outbreaks]. Each of these attacks exploited a known software weakness in one of the millions of servers and workstations connected to the Internet. Such weaknesses can be exploited to create what's called "cascading failures", which is a self-replicating failure that induces further failures. So far such failures have been limited to only ten thousands of sites. When the cyberterrorists will approach the study of Internet weaknesses in a planned and concerted manner, and if they devote substantial resources to such pursuits, they can continually experiment with more and more potent ways of creating denial-of-service failures. The chances are that any such attack would be is well thought out and a contributory campaign in an otherwise concerted act of cyberwar.
