Cyberterror Not Yet a Credible Threat, Says Policy Thinktank

Trailrunner7 writes "A new report by a Washington policy think tank dismisses out of hand the idea that terrorist groups are currently launching cyber attacks and says that the recent attacks against US and South Korean networks were not damaging enough to be considered serious incidents. The report, written by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, looks at cyberwar through the prism of the Korean attacks, and calls the idea that terrorists have attack capabilities and just aren't using them 'nonsensical.' 'A very rough estimate would say that there is a lag of three and eight years between the capabilities developed by advanced intelligence agencies and the capabilities available for purchase or rental in the cybercrime black market. The evidence for this is partial and anecdotal, but the trend has been consistent for more two decades,' Lewis writes."

Comments

Re:bring back the pr0n!

[sopssa]

Well I think this whole "cyberterror" idea is pretty funny. I even remember that back in 2000 in school we had to write about some article where they described "cyber attacks from China goverment". Has anyone actually proven that China as a goverment is doing those? It still seems like a myth. Considering world is filled with script kiddies, and China+India together have half of the population on Earth, it's not surprising that many percentage of them could be from there.

Another thing is that it's quite hard to launch such a catastrophic, large-scale attack against the internet. Yeah, you can cause some minor annoyance or accidentally route traffic elsewhere like what happened with YouTube for ~30 mins a few years ago, but those are quickly fixed when upstream ISP's responsible notice.

Also isn't terror's one meaning to cause, well, terror? What are you going to on the internet, put a scary picture on google.com (if you even could hack it - I bet there have been many that have tried)? It just doesn't sum up.

Depends on the definition.

[Hurricane78]

To me, all that fearmongering of "terrorists" (that don't exist) is creating terror itself. So all the censorship and surveillance on the net would be the actual "cyberterror". If there were a point in adding "cyber-" in front of everything. It's just plain terrorizing the people. For the usual reasons: To gain control over them.