Terrorism:
Terrorism is use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create
a climate of fear in a given population. Terrorist violence targets ethnic
or religious groups, governments, political parties, corporations, and
media enterprises. Organizations that engage in acts of terror are almost
always small in size and limited in resources compared to the populations
and institutions they oppose. Through publicity and fear generated by
their violence, they seek to magnify their influence and power to effect
political change on either a local or an international scale.
Brief History (The
Beginning):
Terrorist acts date back to at least the 1st century, when the Zealots,
a Jewish religious sect, fought against Roman occupation of what is now
Israel. In the 12th century in Iran, the Assassins, a group of Ismailis
(Shiite Muslims), conducted terrorist acts against religious and political
leaders of Sunni Islam. Through the 18th century, terrorists generally
acted from religious zeal. Beginning in the 19th century, terrorist movements
acquired a more political and revolutionary orientation. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, anarchists in Italy, Spain, and France used
terrorism. Prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the Russian revolutionary
movement also possessed a strong terrorist element in its struggle against
Russian royalty and aristocracy.
In the latter half of the 20th century acts of terror multiplied, driven by fierce nationalist and ideological motivations and facilitated by technological advances in transportation, communications, microelectronics, and explosives. The conflict between Arab nations and Israel following the end of World War II in 1945 produced successive waves of terrorism in the Middle East. In the 1970s and 1980s organized terror spilled into Western Europe and other parts of the world as supporters of Palestinian resistance to Israel carried their war abroad and as domestic conflicts gave birth to terrorist organizations in countries such as West Germany (now part of the Federal Republic of Germany), Italy, and Japan. In the United States, terrorism has chiefly consisted of attacks by isolated individuals who violently oppose state and corporate power.
Cyberterrorism:
Terrorism's younger relative, cyberterrorism, came out in the 20th
century, with the mass popularization of computers and especially Internet.
Cyberterrorism could be any kind of terrorism activity that is created
or assisted with the usage of computer; it could also be any malicious
attempt against a computer or a computer network.
Probably the most popular example of cyberterrorism is the usage of computer viruses. The computer viruses are so common nowadays, most of the time they are taken as something usual, something we just have to live with.
Definition:
- Computer terrorism is the act of destroying or of corrupting computer systems with an aim of destabilizing a country or of applying pressure on a government.
- Computer terrorism is the act of doing something intended to destabilize a country or to apply pressure on a government by using methods classified in the category of computer crimes.
It is possible to carry out three types of actions against an information
system, a physical, syntactic or semantic attack:
- The physical attack consists of damaging equipment in a " traditional " way, bomb, fire, etc.
- The syntactic attack consists of modifying the logic of the system in order to introduce delays or to make the system unpredictable. An attack by means of a virus or of a Trojan horse is included in this category.
The semantic attack is more perfidious. It exploits the confidence that the users have in their system. It consist of modifying information that is entering or exiting the system, without the users' knowledge, in order to induce errors.
