Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

270 • INFORMATION WARFAREINFORMATION WARFARE. Information-oriented warfare is associatedwith low- to high-intensity conflicts and may partly involvestrategic information warfare in which computer infrastructures forcommand, communications, control, and intelligence are directlyattacked, whether by physical targeting or by means of hackingor attacks by computer viruses. It is relatively cheap and easy forindividuals or groups to shut down computer systems and causeenormous financial losses through hacking and other attacks on informationsystems. In many well-publicized cases, such as the “I loveyou” virus that afflicted information systems throughout the world,the motives of the perpetrators were neither terroristic nor done forpurposes of fraud. Therefore, it is easy to imagine the harm that aterrorist group could inflict if it opted to use cyberattacks as a meansof pressuring its targeted nation or group.Cyberwarfare may not involve attacks on computers so much asusing computer information systems to pursue conventional tactics.For instance, during the Chechen war the original Chechnyan leaderDzhukar Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile when his positionwas pinpointed by means of tracing the signal of his cell phone. Anotherexample is how U.S. counterterrorism efforts have focusedon identifying the bank accounts of terrorist groups and leaders andthen electronically “emptying” them or else transferring a large sumfrom the accounts of a leader to those of a trusted subordinate to createthe impression of embezzlement and to sow rancor and distrustbetween the key members of a terrorist cadre. During the 1990–1991Gulf War, the Iraqi air defense radars were cluttered with hundredsof false signals generated by chips covertly implanted in radarequipment sold to Iraq that were activated by U.S. military codes torender the air defense systems inoperative during any U.S. air attack.Another cyberwarfare tactic, known as a denial-of-service attack,is to swarm a website with thousands of e-mail messages with theintent of shutting the site down. During the course of the 1998–1999Kosovo conflict, official U.S. government websites of the CentralIntelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Department, and the StateDepartment were being bombarded with as many as 30,000 cyberattacksa day originating in Eastern Europe.The term cyberterrorism has been loosely applied to cover instancesof computer-assisted embezzlement or cases of extortion in whichblackmailers have forced financial institutions to pay protection money