Cyber Terrorism Communications and Propaganda

Further expanding the previous discussion on Tracking Down Internet Terrorist Propaganda, and patterns of Arabic Extremist Group Forum Messages' Characteristics, there've also been some recent developments on Hezbollah's never-ending use of U.S hosting companies as a media/communication/fund raising/recruitment/propaganda platform:

"Hezbollah used the Broadwing Communications fiber-optic network to deliver its Al-Manar web site to the world last week after finding a weakness in a Broadwing customer's connection. When that happened, Hezbollah television's web site was suddenly hosted, of all places, in Texas. When Broadwing discovered what had happened, they cut the T1 connection to their customer until the customer resolved the problems on its end, and the Al-Manar site disappeared back into the ether—only to pop up a few hours later on a server in India. Hezbollah's tactics are laid out in a brief Time article that also discusses the people trying to shut Hezbollah down. And it's not the people you might think. Those in the war and security business are no doubt involved, but some of the work is done by amateurs, as well. Volunteers from the Society for Internet Research track jihadi websites and tactics across the Internet, then alert domain registrars and web hosting companies to the presence of potentially illegal material on their servers."

Al Manar TV has long been known for delivering Hezbollah's PSYOPS through constantly relocating its stream, but information warfare capable enemies seem to be able to hijack the signal as it recently happened. Moreover, according to Haganah's most recent Table of American Internet Service Providers of Hezbollah -- detailed analyses -- Register.com remains a popular choice.

Cyber terrorism is a complex and often misunderstood term that originally emerged as the direct effect of Techno Imperialism sentiments, and, of course, the balancing power of the Internet when it comes to cyber warfare capabilities. In another great research Cyber Terrorism: A Study of the Extent of Coverage in Computer Security Textbooks, the author summarized the most commonly encountered Cyber Terrorism categories and keywords, and discussed the different explanations of the term. As for Cyber terrorism, the first issue that comes to the mind of the average expert are the SCADA systems whose IP based connectivity remains a growing concern for governments utilizing these. Which is exactly the least issue to worry about, today's Cyber terrorism is still maturing, tomorrow's Cyber terrorism will be taking advantage of cyber warfare capabilities on demand or through direct recruitment/blackmailing practices of individuals capable of delivering them. Here's a neat table representing the maturity/evolution of Cyber terrorism.

For the time being, propaganda and recruitment are so far the most indirect and popular practices, whereas the concept itself is truly maturing thus becoming even more evident. Thankfully, various researchers are already actively combining AI and various web crawling approaches while analyzing the presence of terrorists on the web -- and here's a good starting point.

Related resources and posts:
Cyber Terrorism
Hacktivism
Information Warfare
Cyberterrorism - don't stereotype and it's there!
Cyberterrorism - recent developments
The Current, Emerging, and Future State of Hacktivism
Terrorist Social Network Analysis
Hacktivism Tensions - Israel vs Palestine Cyberwars