NCJ Number
189546
Date Published
April 1998
Length
49 pages
Annotation
This document presents comments made during a seminar on cyber-terrorism and information warfare.
Abstract
Cyber-terrorists could utilize electronic communications to control destructive action from afar, including attacks on the operation of water, electric, gas, telephone, television and financial systems, interference with land and air transportation, and disruption of communications between governments. There are three ways in which computers can be used by terrorists and other criminals: as a tool, as a receptacle of evidence, and as a target. One way to use computers as a tool is to use them for disseminating propaganda. Terrorist also use computers and the Internet for fund raising and intelligence gathering. Using the computer as a receptacle of evidence enables officials to find evidence of terrorist activity. One way of using the computer as a target is to use hacking techniques to gain unauthorized access to a system. Another way is flooding the system with emails or using any one of a number of tools to cause the system to crash so that the legitimate user no longer has the capability to use that system. Global connectivity is a factor that has increased the threat of terrorism. Critical infrastructures are those surfaces that are so vital that their destruction or debilitation would have a debilitating impact on the economic or national security of the United States. The main reason that they are so vulnerable is because they rely on computers for command, control, and communications. A study by the Computer Security Institute showed that 64 percent of private sector companies polled reported some sort of information security breach. The Defense Information Systems Agency did an estimate showing that 250,000 attacks occurred against Department of Defense systems in 1995. The National Infrastructure Protection Center was created to detect, deter, prevent, warn of and respond to both physical and cyber attacks on the Nation’s critical infrastructures. The Center’s mission is also to manage computer intrusion investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through 56 field officers, and to support the FBI’s other law enforcement counterterrorism and counterintelligence missions.