Cybercrime Vs Cyberterrorism

Cybercrime and Cyberterrorism may sound the same but they actually carry different meanings and actions being done through the internet.
Cybercrime refers to any criminal activity done using a computer and network. It had also been defined as offences carried out with criminal motives to intentionally harm the victim's reputation or to cause physical damage or emotional anguish through modern telecommunication network. While it is easy to understand what cyber crime meant, cyberterrorism brings a much complex meaning as compared to cybercrime. Cyberterrorism uses the internet to carry out terrorist activities such as deliberately causing large scale disruption of computer networks.

However, cyberterrorism comes in two definition. By way of narrow definition and broad definition. By narrow definition, cyberterrorism meant "attacks that threatens property or lives and can be defined as the leveraging a target's computers and information, particularly via the internet to cause physical, real world harm or severe disruption of infrastructure. In broad definition, cyberterrorism carries the meaning of "the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate a person into furtherance of such objectives."

Cybercrime is a huge umbrella covering a broad range of activities. It may however be divided into two categories where a) crimes that mainly targets computer directly and (b) crimes using the internet and computer as proxy while the real target is of the real world. Crimes that targets computers includes computer viruses, denial of service attacks, and malware while category B of cybercrime includes, cyberstalking, fraud and identity theft, information warfare and phishing scam.

Fine examples of cybercrime including spam, fraud (bank fraud, identity theft, extortion, theft of classified information), obscene or offensive content (such as texts containing racism, blasphemous, political subversive, libelous or slanderous, seditious or inflammatory material leading to hate crimes, child pornography), harassment (cyber-stalking, cyber-bullying, hate crime), and threats.

As said before, cyberterrorism is hard to explain or to even define the meaning of it, but it mainly consists of sabotaging activities such as the financial and other damage caused by a dissatisfied employee named Vitek Boden who caused the release of untreated sewage water in Maroochy Shire, Australia. Another fine example would be the mass cyber attack on Estonia in year 2007 during the wake of the removal of a Russian World War 2 war memorial downtown Tallian. The attack was carried out through denial-of-service causing selected websites to be bombarded with traffic to force shut down.

Hence it could be concluded that cybercrime activities are carried out to target only certain individuals or selected victims whilst cyberterrorism targets a large scale of computers or an institution due to political reasons. Cybercrime also covers a large scale of activities that are harmful towards people while cyberterrorism causes mainly major disruption in computer networks which amounts to huge financial damages.


For Further Reading :
http://iconof.com/blog/cybercrime-cyberterrorism-inducing-anxiety-fear-on-individuals/