Terrorism is commonly known as inflicted fear in victims and the use of violence for political reasons. Acts of terrorism are usually large scale and tend to hurt a lot of people in the process, physically, mentally and emotionally. The scale is important as to create a huge impact.
I never knew what terrorism was in the past until the September 11 attacks in 2001. I remember I was 12 then and was watching the live reports on the attacks on CNN. That was the first time I got to understand what terrorism was. For most people in Singapore, terrorism would have been an unknown concept because we usually take the peace we enjoy here in Singapore for granted. 911 was the most large scale attack I’ve known and it introduced the concept of terrorism to most people who were ignorant in the past.
There are many forms of terrorism present. The one that most of us are familiar with would be the use of violence and explosives to kill the victims. Another form of terrorism would be biological terrorism and cyber terrorism. I would like to elaborate more on cyber terrorism.
Many people would think of terrorism as violent acts and such but there is another form of terrorism that is unlike the one we are familiar with. This form of terrorism is cyber terrorism.
With such rapid technological advances in the world today, and the growing number of internet users, the internet has become the fastest and easiest mode of communication and transmitting information to one another. Many are able to access the internet with the use of satellite devices and the internet covers more than 150 countries in the world. Therefore, using computers and electronic networks as a base for terrorism would increase the scale of terrorism tremendously, which is what terrorists aim for. The terrorist are able to send viruses to the computers using the internet and even hack into government computer systems.
As portrayed in the movie, Die Hard 4 .0 (Live Free or Die Hard), the cyber terrorists get highly confidential information by hacking into the FBI’s computer system and led to a breach of the FBI facility’s computer system. The terrorists are able to manipulate the stock markets, causing it to crash. Furthermore, they are able to control the traffic and cause major car accidents and the injury of many innocent victims and shut down the power plants throughout the United Sates. This has allowed them to successfully inflicted fear on the victims.
As we know, whatever we see in movies are highly exaggerated. However, we are moving towards a world where almost everything is computerized and technological advancements are rapid. Terrorists too are catching up with technology and manipulating it to their interests. Thus, it is not completely impossible that such a scenario might happen in real life.
The impacts of cyber terrorism would be very different from that of the traditional terrorism. The damage cyber terrorism does to the attacked areas would be worse. Cyber terrorism allows the scale to be increase tremendously, and the terrorists need not be on the site itself. It would have tremendous economic, social and political impacts on the world.
