ABSTRACT:
This paper examines Cyber-Security and Politically, Socially and Religiously Motivated Cyber-Attacks, focusing on the European Union as an international organisation with a fragmented yet developing interest in cyber-security. The paper is presented in three parts. Part 1 assesses the source and nature of cyber threats.
Society’s increasing dependence on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure creates vulnerabilities and corresponding opportunities to be
exploited by the unscrupulous, ranging from low-level, individual computer hacking to serious and organised crime, ideological and political extremism, and state-sponsored cyber attacks such as those perpetrated against Estonia in 2007. ICT also has an important enabling function in each of these cases. The Internet seems to fit the requirements of ideological and political extremists particularly well, and governments can only expect the ‘ungoverned space’ of the global ICT infrastructure to be ever more closely contested. At the level of states and governments, it is clear that in some quarters the Internet is becoming viewed as a battlefield where conflict can be won or lost. The threats can inter-connect when circumstances demand – terrorist groups, for
example, can be sophisticated users of the Internet but can also make use of low-level criminal methods such as hacking in order to raise funds. The challenge to cybersecurity policy-makers is therefore not only broad, but complex and evolutionary.
