Building an Ontology for Cyberterrorism

Cyberterrorism and the use of the Internet for cyberterrorism is an emerging field. Often cyberterrorism activities overlap with traditional hacking and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Infrastructure exploitation. As a result, the defining and differentiating characteristics of cyberterrorism can easily be misunderstood. The use of an ontology specifically developed for cyberterrorism, will provide a common framework to share conceptual models. By using an ontology, the internal and external environment of a field (in this case, cyberterrorism) can be captured together with the relationships between the environments. This paper proposes an ontology to identify whether a cyber event can be classified as a cyberterrorist attack or a support activity. The role of the cyberterrorism ontological model will be to provide a better structure and depiction of relationships, interactions and influencing factors by capturing the content and boundaries in the field of cyberterrorism. The ontology will be developed using a cyberterrorism framework covering influencing factors, together with a compiled network attack classification ontology. Classes will be drawn from research carried out on the use of ICT in the support of cyberterrorism. As defined in this research, a cyberterrorism attack consists of a high-level motivation that is religious, social or political. Th