Definitions of Cyber Terrorism

The phrase cyber terror appeared for the first time in the mid-eighties. According to several sources, Barry C. Collin, a senior person research fellow of the Institute for Security and Intelligence in California, defined cyber terror at that time as “the convergence of cybernetics and terrorism”—an elegant and simple definition. That definition, however, was not specific enough to make a clear distinction with terms like cybercrime, cyber activism (hacktivism), and cyber extremism. The first glimpses of the cyber revolution, the next wave after the industrial revolution, were much debated in the eighties (e.g., Toffler, 1980). It was therefore no surprise that the first discussions were raised in that decade about cyber terror and terrorism in the envisioned new world. In the nineties, the debate about the cyber revolution widened to phenomenon such as information warfare and information superiority. That reinforced the idea again that terrorists could enter cyberspace and use that as a domain for terroristic actions. This idea was reflected by the National Research Council (1991): “Tomorrow’s terrorist may be able to do more damage with a keyboard than with a bomb.” As a result, cyber terrorism was added to the list of serious national threats to the United States. The unexpected outcome of the 1993 battle of Mogadishu (Bowden, 1999) showed the potential of an asymmetric threat with a major political impact, and with the millennium uncertainties, further widened the societal uncertainty about a possible terrorist initiated risk from cyberspace for the public. Since then, the term cyber terror has helped to create dramatic and attention grabbing newspaper headlines. This chapter subsequently asserts that, based on a definition developed from previous definitions, the world has not yet experienced a real cyber terror impacting event