Responding to Cyberterrorism: Options and Avenues

The range of counterterrorism tools available to states and other actors is both large and diverse. Military, legal, and political instruments are all widely used - often underpinned by competing conceptions of what ‘terrorism’ is. In this article, we seek briefly to sketch some of the ways in which a new addition to the terrorism ‘family’ has been or might be confronted: cyberterrorism. Although a contested concept (in part - but not only - because of the broader contestability of ‘terrorism’), a growing literature is now taking shape on how best to confront this ‘threat’, if it is, indeed, a threat. Our article seeks to take stock of some of this literature, to point to relevant related debates within terrorism research, and to identify some of the particularities of dealing with cyberterrorism