Terrorist use of the Internet: exploitation and support through ICT infrastructure

Abstract

The growth of technology has provided a wealth of functionality. One area in which Information Communication Technology (ICT), especially the Internet, has grown to play a supporting role is terrorism. The Internet provides an enormous amount of information, and enables relatively cheap and instant communication across the globe. As a result, the conventional view of many traditional terrorist groups shifted to embrace the use of technology within their functions. The goal of this paper is to represent the functions and methods that terrorists have come to rely on through the ICT infrastructure. The discussion sheds light on the technical and practical role that ICT infrastructure plays in the assistance of terrorism. The use of the Internet by terrorist groups has expanded from traditional Internet usage to more innovative usage of both traditional and new Internet functions. Global terrorist groups can now electronically target an enormous amount of potential recipients, recruitees and enemies. The aim of the paper is to show how the Internet can be used to enable terrorism, as well as provide technical examples of the support functionality and exploitation. This paper summarises the high-level functions, methods and examples for which terrorists utilise the Internet. This paper looks at the use of the Internet as both a uni-directional and bi-directional tool to support functionality like recruitment, propaganda, training, funding and operations. It also discusses specific methods like the dissemination of web literature, social-networking tools, anti-forensics and fund-raising schemes. Additional examples, such as cloaking and coding techniques, are also provided. In order to analyse how ICT infrastructure can be used in the support of terrorism, a mapping is given of communication direction to the traditional Internet use functions and methods, as well as to innovative Internet functions and methods.