'Terrorism' the word itself terrorizes us in so many ways. This threat, the world is facing from quite a long time now and it has considerably changed over the last 20-25 years. Recently, though we have seen a spate of smaller less sophisticated act of terrorism across geographies that involve mass casualties and fear including events. We as a humanity have always suffered the threat and repercussions of this act. We humans are already been a victim of this gruesome act and to add to our misery a new kind of terrorism to threaten humanity has came up known as 'cyber terrorism.’ In this kind of terrorism the internet is used to conduct violent acts that results in law threatens loss of life or significantly bodily harm, in in order to achieve political or ideological gains through threat and intimidation. “Cyber terrorism” is in itself a controversial term. Some authors opt for a very narrow definition relating to deployment by known terrorist organisation of disruption attacks against information system for the primary purpose of creating alarm, panic or physical disruption. Government all over the globe are working to understand and minimise these vulnerabilities but cyber threats are becoming more and more sophisticated everyday and those responsible from policymakers to military officials to facility operators to regulator's a working to keep pace. Well, this this is a very new problem which has emerged only in last 20 to 25 years. As we become more connected and reliant on technology we become more vulnerable to these kind of problems. Such attacks through rarely made public, are occurring more frequently. The potential perpetrators of acts of Cyber terrorism can be separated into 5 categories such as
- Organized crimes
- Hacktivism
- Non state terror groups
- Lone wolves
- Nation States
Although the motivation capabilities and priorities vary among the groups each can wreak havoc on a global scale; with ever increasing funding. As, these factors coverage opportunity could combine with existing motives to inflict catastrophic Cyber terrorism losses for business. Over time, cyber insurance policies have evolved to cover the failure of Technology and the resulting interruption or loss of revenue. Insurers are also increasing leave recognising the inter independence of businesses specially through Technology. Many cyber policies now contain provisions for business interruption and contingent business interruption including those involving disruption of an organisation's supply chain from a data breach. Business interruption coverage has become more common coverage component with cyber insurance policies over the last few years.
Now let us find out why these Cyber terrorist are growing day by day and how:-
The landscape for points of attack is growing, traditional physical processes carried out by industrial control system such as power utilities water treatment services and health emergency systems are coming online. Cyber threats are becoming more advanced, the upsurge of highly skilled hackers often nation-state supported is coinciding with the development of more sophisticated tools that are likely sleeping into the border environment through thriving black market. Companies are now deeply dependent on their system and data and interference with those acids can material affect market capitalisation and endangered executive leadership reputation sales and profits. Failures in cybersecurity have the potential to destablize an enterprise overnight. A shift has begin to take place in the nature of Cyber incidents, from affecting primarily consumers to have an impact on global political or economic system as a whole.
Few examples of Cyber terrorism are :-
Traditionally, most cyber attacks have been carried out by criminal organisations with the majority of incidents failing to register on enterprise risk scale of business that faced significant setbacks. In 2017, this dynamic change with the WannaCry and NotPetya incidents. these two attacks affected organisations in more than 150 countries from it business interruption and other losses estimated as well over USD 300 million by some companies brought reputational damage, and resulted in loss of customer data.
