Cyber Strategies for the New Digital Revolution (£)

As the analysis reaches deeper behind the recent Paris attacks in 2015, it has become clear that terrorism today is a widening series of global alliances often assisted and connected via cyber social media and electronic propaganda. 

Cyberspace has radically transfigured into a new Digital Revolution, where different types of computers are becoming the new brainchild of our cognitive culture. Just as the mechanisation of agriculture and production took over the mussels and body of our workers so the computer has begun to replace our brains, machinery and infrastructures.

These new electronic networks leave "exhaust" data, which relates to the social activities and commercial transactions of network traders and political and business collaborators, which in turn tells us forensically much about what happened with the data’s use. 

However electronic data has also become increasingly a huge open door to insecurity. In the early years of cyber we traded off these disadvantages against the upside however we have for the last decade reached the cyber borders where we can assume that security constantly applies and requires a sophisticated continual audit process. And these systems require far more senior management understanding and involvement and should not be left just to the technologists. 

Until Edward J. Snowden began leaking classified documents, billions of people relied on a more common type of security called Transport Layer Security or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology to protect the transmission of sensitive data like passwords, financial details, intellectual property and personal information. That technology is familiar to many Web users through the “https” and padlock symbol at the beginning of Web addresses that are encrypted. 
But now Snowden’s leaked NSA documents makes it clear that the intelligence agencies are recording high volumes of encrypted Internet traffic and using it for analysis. It has more recently become clearer to Western Intelligence even outside the Five Eyes (US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand) operations that this spying process includes many other countries including Iran, North Korea, South Africa, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia all of whom store and monitor vast amounts of Internet traffic. 
However, if we look at how aspects of Cyber have affected law enforcement and police response to Cyber-Crime the results for many government police forces is not very positive. For instance, it has become clear that in the UK only three out of 43 police forces in England and Wales in 2014 had a comprehensive plan to deal with Cyber Crime and that less than 1% of cyber-crime is investigated.

But let’s get a historic perspective as a similar process to the expansion of the Internet took place a couple of thousand years ago with the human use and understanding of the seas and connected oceans. Most shipping used the oceans and seas for trade and fishing, just as now cyberspace is used for commerce and social networking. However, piracy also became part of the seas criminal activity. 

Also in the 15th and 16th Centuries governments and commercial groups often used piracy as part of their own operations. These hacker pirates were used to steal and attack other government shipping and the privateering government could claim that the attacks were nothing to do with them as these were pirate attacks. 

Currently commercial organisations of all types are now undergoing an erratic series of cyber-attacks. Recently some have become headline news; from breaches of Sony, the International Monetary Fund, JP Morgan Chase and Symantec. And analysis suggests that ninety percent of small and medium businesses in the US and EU do not have adequate Cyber security protection. 

Across the oceans China’s electronic cyber capabilities are very well developed and they are further forward that most in the cyber arena. And China has therefore increased its electronic and cyber effectiveness by collaborating with North Korea and Russia and with Russia it signed a cyber-security agreement in May 2015 in which it agreed with Russia not to cyber-attack each other and it has recently attempted a similar agreement with the US.

Russia has also made use of cyber pirates and privateering methods. They have engaged with cyber hackers and criminal groups to be able to plausibly deny their involvement in the attacks. But Russia has also actively shown some of its cyber-attack ability by the attacks it has made on Georgia, Ukraine, US and of course Estonia. 

As the Internet continues to expand, and electronic infrastructures and systems are given more interconnections the links into the Dark Web will increase becoming more complex and interdependent and so cyber-attacks and electronic terrorism will increase, just as piracy increased and was only eventually begun to be controlled by the Treaty of Paris agreement of 1856, which 55 States ratified, almost a thousand years after the piracy process began.

For terrorists, electronic threats and attacks have distinct advantages over traditional crime and physical war attacks as they can be controlled distantly, secretly, and economically. The attack process does not require large financing of weapons and recruits. The effects and propaganda can be global and intense. The incidents of cyberterrorism are likely to increase.