Information-Age Terrorism

Abstract

JOHN ARQUILLA is a professor of defense studies at the Naval Postgraduate School and a RAND consultant. DAVID RONFELDT is a senior social scientist at RAND. MICHELE ZANINI is a doctoral fellow at the RAND Graduate School. This article draws on the authors' "Networks, Netwar, and Information-Age Terrorism," in Zalmay M. Khalilzad and John P. White, eds., Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1999). ; Today, an instance or prospect of "cyberterrorism" makes the news almost every week. The idea of terrorists surreptitiously hacking into a government, military, commercial, or socially critical computer system to introduce a virus or worm, turn off a crucial public service, steal or alter sensitive information, deface or swamp a web site, route bogus messages, or plant a Trojan horse for future activation alarms security personnel, spellbinds the media, and genuinely worries policymakers. Although fears that the Y2K problem could provide opportunities to some terrorists have not been realized, other developments since January—such as the denial-of-service attacks against a few on-line commercial enterprises based in the United States (Yahoo! and eBay, among others), and speculation that software developers secretly associated with Aum Shinrikyo cult may have placed Trojan horses in sensitive computer systems in Japan—continue to enliven the threat of cyberterrorism. ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.