Cyber Crime & Cyber Terrorism

The book I read to research this post was Cyber Crime & Cyber Terrorism Investigator’s Handbook by Babak Akhbari et al which is a very good book that I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is a detailed examination of what constitutes as cyber crime and cyber terrorism and the measures that can be taken to investigate and prevent it. Cyber terrorism in itself is something that rarely happens in it’s true form. There have only been 2 incidents of true cyber terrorism and both were thwarted. One was a terrorist cell in Pakistan tried to change people’s blood types in a hospital database thus if they got a blood transfusion they would get the wrong type of blood and die. The other was by a terrorist faction in London that tried to blow up the Plus Net headquarters rendering people who relied on their ISP service helpless. Many websites would have been incapacitated which could potentially have resulted in loss of life. There were many medical websites dependent on this service. More common is terrorism and crime that isn’t of a wholly cyber nature but has a cyber aspect. Things like using phishing websites to raise funds for a terrorist cause. It’s well known things like pirated media like software funds terrorism. There was a case in Sri Lanka where the Tamil Tigers launched a huge number of e-mails at their embassies with a message to try and frighten them. Just because there haven’t been many cyber terrorist attacks doesn’t mean precautions don’t need to taken to potentially thwart it. This kind of thing isn’t just against governments either. The church of scientology tried to have a parody interview with a Tom Cruise double removed from YouTube and faced several Denial of Service attacks to their website and had to beef up security to stop it happening. I did really enjoy this book and it is on an interesting subject. I can tell the authors know their stuff inside out.