Cyber‐Terrorism: The Shape of Future Conflict?

Abstract

Is cyber‐terrorism the threat of the future? The convergence of current conventional wisdoms regarding technological and socio‐political developments suggests that it may be. In regard to technology, the ‘Information Mania’ that has swept the US defence establishment since the 1991 Gulf War has now reached European and Asian defence planners. To its acolytes in the defence community, Information Warfare is the paradigm of future war. At the same time, the popular imagination is gripped by the accelerating digitisation of society. As the Internet continues its exponential growth and increasing portions of everyday life go online, the media and public are titillated by the daring exploits of hackers and the ‘digital underground’. Warnings of a catastrophic collapse of national and even global information infrastructures abound, most dramatically in relation to the Year 2000 problem.