Cyber Terrorism or Cyber Hooliganism?

Cyber Terrorism and Cyber Hooliganism

In the last couple of weeks Saudi and Israeli hackers have been busy exchanging attacks on web sites in the respective counties and publishing personal information, including credit card numbers for citizens of the other side. This is far from the first time that the Arab Israeli conflict resulted in hacking contests, usually happening around periods of tension such as the Gaza invasion in 2009 or the Turkish Flotilla to Gaza in 2010. These incidents provide a very interesting insight into psychology of our reaction to violence in general and cyber violence in particular.

The incidents created large media frenzy, at least here in Israel, and got the attention of most. However let’s look at the actual implications of the attacks to the victims: firstly, the size of the attacks was minor compared to everyday hacking activity both in down time to the attacked sites and in loss of personal information. Secondly, there is absolutely no indicator that any of those incidents cause any significant damage beyond some sleepless nights to system administrators in the affected organizations. It might be too early to conclude that for the current round, but this was certainly the case for the previous ones. Moreover, the result of the media frenzy tends to enable security professionals to claim and receive more resources for information security initiatives, thus reducing the chance that cyber warfare would be affective if ever really called for.

Caricature from the Israeli daily Haaretz. Mother asking: “what are you doing with computer all day?”

One would think that those incidents form the cyber world counterpart to terrorism. Terrorism is a violent activity specifically meant to derive psychological results with minimum resources and therefore usually little real damage. When Steven Pinker analyzes the decline of violence in the world in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, he discusses terrorism because we all feel it is an important type of violence, but as he shows, the actual numbers would make this discussion unimportant since compared to homicide and wars, terrorism just does not show on the charts.

However, one important aspect is missing from those incidents to classify them as terror – while they elicit attention, they do not elicit fear – by definition a prime goal of terrorism. Therefore I think we should refer to those incidents as hooliganism. Just like all hooligan acts they are pretty stupid and pointless and do not serve any purpose the hooligans had in mind, if they had any in the first place. Moreover just like other hooliganism types, governments should oppose and prevent such activity when done by their own citizens even more than when done by others.