CYBER-TERRORISM- LEGAL AND POLICY OPTIONS FOR COORDINATED NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS
Keywords:
Stuxnet, Cyber-terrorism, cyber security, wannacry, NigeriaAbstract
Improved youth literacy juxtaposed with high unemployment rate plus fundamental historical and religious distrust makes a perfect recipe for cyber-terrorism to thrive. Cyber-terrorism has become the newest and biggest potential expression of terrorism globally. While 9/11 opened a new vista in international terrorism, the Stuxnet cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear facility (2010), Wannacry virus attack (2017) et al. demonstrates the latent capacity of the cyber-terrorist in achieving his devious purpose using technology.
This paper explains some fundamentals of cyber-terrorism, its potential damaging effect on critical infrastructure and its possible deployment as an instrument of mass disruption and destruction. It also canvasses policy options to be considered to reduce the effect of an attack. Scholarly articles and commissioned papers were reviewed on the subject. This paper however, uniquely discusses the subject from a Nigerian cyber security policy, strategy and law perspective.
Key words: Cyber-terrorism, cyber security, Stuxnet, Wannacry
References
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14. A class of people or residents within a geographic expression, and recently certain strategic or symbolic properties are the targets of terrorists.
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29. These are malicious programmes that are primed to start operating at a specified time in the future. The trigger could be time or event specific. Some original software makers could insert this programme in their software to make it start malfunctioning after some years in order to increase purchase of the programme. A sacked or maltreated employee may also want to hurt the employee and therefore programme a logic bomb into the system to disrupt the operations of the organisation at a future date without being directly linked with the incident.
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41. Apologies to the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti the legendary musician who popularised this expression.
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