Orna Gadish - Cyber Terror: How It Happens And What We Can Do

Cyber Terror

How It Happens
And What We Can Do

Orna Gadish, M.Sc.

Copyright 2017 Orna Gadish.
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Gadish, Orna

Cyber Terror: How It Happens and What We Can Do

Produced in the U.S.A.

Long after the Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid eighteenth century, the Internet has become one of the most significant global transformation tools in the world. Following the invention of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the Internet Revolution has engulfed the western world with its powerful social, cultural and economic impact. Today, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the software, the hardware, the communication systems, and the patterns of information delivery and its storage have been changed to an extent that our world has become flat.

In todays virtually flat worldservers are capable to store unlimited amount of data and retrieve it to client computers at the speed of light; the cloud technology allows to spare much space on personal computers' hard drives and on mobile devices that have become faster and lighter than ever before; messages are sent and received via email, social networks, and mobile Apps in a fraction of a second; search engines fetch instantly unbounded resources; businesses use outsourcing and off-shoring services from distant locations; and software is developed modularly, in cooperation among experts around the world.

Boundless online communities, both personal and professional, have emerged around myriad themes and multiple interests, and it looks like the social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn , and the like have become an integral part of our communication patterns and our real interactions with our colleagues, family and friends.

This Cultural Revolution has affected us enormously, not only socially, psychologically and emotionally, but also physically. Not only have we become part of this physical net, but also our identities have evolved to embrace Internet technologies as our real personal extensions.

In various aspects of our lives, our constructive efforts on the global network have changed our behavioral patterns completely from personal and distinguishable, before the Internet Revolution, we have turned into communal, multiple, fragmented, global, and more obscure. To an extent, we have become virtual inhabitants, profiles and avatars, existent and elusive at the same time.

Our geographical location, social background, gender, race, economic status, and other physical and sociocultural definers and identifiers come to play a diminishing role today, as the information we possess, our knowledge, our expertise, skills and talents, define and redefine us and they seem to lead the way. The scale of this borderless communal world has extended to include millions of individuals from different locations, nationalities and religions across the globe. Americans and Russians, Chinese and Africans, Indians and Arabs, to name a few, who for the most part, strive to play the game on equal terms by the same rules in the global arena.

It is impossible to imagine our lives today without being connected, without communicating via email, without regularly checking on our messages from our real and virtual friends on the social media, without the Apps and the games, without the countless communities, messengers, forums and chats, without the online stores, such as Amazon and eBay , without Google and YouTube and Yahoo , without the open resources and the open sources, without the countless news and entertainment channels, without the open universities and the online learning portals.

We read online, we write online, we watch videos online, we interact online, we are informed online, we learn online, we work online, we have a good time online, and whether we like it or not, our life today is becoming overwhelmingly online.

Along with this convergence between the virtual and the physical our dependence on the virtual world for our physical, day to day experiences, has increased enormously, making Internet technologies indispensable. The Internet is present everywhere in our lives today and most of us cannot imagine our lives without it.

The Internet is also used extensively on the communal, civil, corporate, and national levels for storage of data and for its transfer, for communication, for management, for infrastructure operation, and in the business world. Much of our products and services reside on the net or can be accessed from it directly. Concurrently, the virtual repositories of information and the Cloud technology replace gradually the print records and the local hard drives and flash discs. Also, more and more physical devices, electronic appliances and gadgets proudly owned by us are capable to connect online wirelessly (e.g., via Wi-Fi ) or via radio cellular networks (e.g., 4G).

With the advent of the Internet of things Internet powered smart objects and home appliances, our dependence on the web has increased, making our physical reliance on the virtual even more pronounced. With its wireless capabilities, the Internet has become more and more transparent. It is almost nowhere, but it's still everywhere around us, an indispensable part of our behaviors and habits a trend that is expected to increase in the forthcoming years.

Our critical infrastructures, such energy systems, emergency services, telecommunication, banking and finances, transportation, aviation, water systems, as well as our defense Global Information Grid (GIG), the all-encompassing communications project of the US Department of Defense also take advantage of Internet technologies hardware, software, and communication systems, although they are not connected to the enterprise network.

Despite the revolutionary breakthroughs in research and development, and consequently, the magnificent benefits of hardware and software systems and the global netthe Internet appears to be a mixed blessing for the western society, due to the threats that have emerged, alongside the Internets exponential growth in prevalence in private, corporate, and national arenas, and our downright reliance on it. Some of the threats target the Internet infrastructure per se, the IT infrastructure houses within government, financial institutions, or influential multinational corporations, for the confidential and highly sensitive information they store. Other threats target the personal online services and products we use and rely blindly on. The imminent cyber threats attest to the ability of the evildoers to turn the aforementioned boons of Internet technologies into nothing but banes. And so upon landing in the wrong hands the Internet has the power to become a very lethal weapon.

Our reliance on Internet technologies is undergoing a constant threat today, as the very same global and powerful technologies have reached the terror organizations and their supporters, politically and religiously motivated activists and hacktivists, fanatics and radical Muslim Jihadists , radicalized individuals or groups supporting terror organizations such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah . Such radicalized individuals or groups, based in various locations across the globe, have learnt to harness the global tools, with all of their benefits for the purpose of technological, economic, sociocultural, and political destruction of the western world.