Cases

Reported Incidents of Cyberterrorism

By using the Internet, the terrorist can influence much wider harm or change to a country than one could by killing some people. From immobilizing a countries military defense to shutting off the power in a large area, the terrorist can have an effect on more people at less danger to himself, than through other means.

1997

The first reported incident of this nature took place in 1997 when an offshoot of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) claimed responsibility for “suicide email bombings” against Sri Lankan embassies over a two-week period.  Calling themselves the Internet Black Tigers, the group swamped Sri Lankan embassies with about 800 emails a day.  The messages read, “We are the Internet Black Tigers and we’re doing this to disrupt your communications.” The Tamil Tigers are also credited with using a cyber attack to raise money.  After compromising a computer system at Sheffield University in

England in 1997 and capturing the user IDs and passwords of respected faculty, they used the email accounts to send out messages asking donors to send money to a charity in Sri Lanka.

Cyber-terrorists also commit acts of terrorism simply for personal gain. Such a group, known as the Chaos Computer Club, was discovered in 1997. They had created an Active X Control for the Internet that can trick the Quicken accounting program into removing money from a user's bank account. This could easily be used to steal money from users all over the world that have the Quicken software installed on their computer. This type of file is only one of thousands of types of viruses that can do everything from simply annoy users, to disable large networks, which can have disastrous, even life and death, results.

At Worcester, Mass, in 1997, a hacker disabled the computer system of the airport control tower. In the same year a hacker from Sweden jammed the 911 emergency telephone systems in the west-central Florida. 

1999

The Kosovo conflict in 1999 inspired numerous hackers to join the conflict on one side or the other, or to protest the whole thing.  Most of their cyber attacks took the form of web defacements, but there were also numerous of denial of service attacks. Of particular interest, here are the activities of the Serb Black Hand (Crna Ruka) group, because of the radical nature of Crna Ruka.  According to reports, they crashed a Kosovo Albanian web site, justifying their actions with the statement “We shall continue to remove ethnic Albanian lies from the Internet.”  They also planned daily actions against NATO computers and deleted data on a Navy computer.

2000

In 2000, someone hacked into Maroochy Shire, Australia waste management control system and released millions of gallons of raw sewage on the town.

In Russia, in the year 2000, a hacker was able to control the computer system that governed the flow of natural gas through pipelines.

2002

The Israeli cyber warfare professionals targeted human rights and anti-war activists across the U.S.A in late July and August 2002 disrupting communications, harassing hundreds of computer users, and annoying thousands more.

On Oct. 21, 2002, a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack struck the 13 root servers that provide the primary road-map for all internet communications. Nine servers out of these thirteen were jammed. The problem was taken care of in a short period of time.
According to Kevin Coleman (Oct. 10, 2003) the internet being down for just one day could disrupt nearly $6.5 billion worth of transactions.