The comments came during a media round-table session at the Gartner Symposium and IT Expo, which began today in Sydney. The director, Rich Mogull, told journalists that despite the incidence of high profile digital attacks, cyber terrorism is a phenomenon that has never occurred.
"The goal of terrorism is to change society through the use of force or violence, resulting in fear," he explained. "I want to put this cyber terrorism thing to rest. It's a theory, it's not a fact."
Even though there were examples of attacks that has physical consequences -- such as the case of Vitek Boden, who was sentenced to two years in prison for releasing up to 1 million litres of sewage into the river and coastal waters of Maroochydore, Queensland in 2001 -- they could not be described as terrorist acts, Mogull explained. To a large extent it comes down to motive, he said.
"If a directed cyber attack on, say, a power system that... resulted in the blackout of an entire nation or a large region and deaths because of that... that would constitute cyber terrorism if they claimed they did this as a terrorist act," he said. "The motive will define what's terrorism and what's not."
Mogull maintains the argument is largely academic -- it doesn't matter who's attacking an organisation, it should be doing the best it can to protect itself in the first place, whether attacks are coming from criminals or "cyber terrorists".
"Let's stop running around being scared about these esoteric threats out there. Let's look at protecting ourselves by closing the vulnerabilities we know exist, and protecting ourselves from the attacks that we know exist," he said.
How the would this guy know if cyberterrorism has happened or not? What did he get a couple of his analysts to do a google search on cyber terrorism or oh my god maybe he did it himself and since he or they didn't find anyone saying "hey we were victims of cyberterrorism" he or they concluded there was none. Basically, this guy doesn't know a god damn thing about security as its really conducted. He should do a little better googling cause their are supporters of terrorist that are hackers and have been using the Internet to recruit new terrorists, to gather information, to facilitate and hide their communications, and the money associated with terrorism and other forms of Organized Crime. Additionally, terrorist related sites in Asia have been conducting DoS attacks againist anti-terror blogs and other pro-American sites. I'm sorry but this guy wouldn't know a rootkit if it hit him upside the head.