Terrorism in the Cyber Space: The New Battlefield

Abstract: Terrorism has become a global threat from the past few decades and needs to be controlled from the grass root level to the universal level. Internet technology makes it easy for terrorist groups to communicate with relative anonymity, rapidly and effectively across borders, to an almost illimitable audience. This emerged as a threat to nation�s internal security therefore identification of terrorist groups on cyber space has become essential task in recent times. It is the task of determining associations and predicting the relationships that may exist between terrorist nodes. This has several applications including the recognition of terrorism, drug trafficking, gang related offences, frauds and armed robberies etc. There are two types of warfare in the world of terrorism: Conventional Warfare and Cyber Warfare. Conventional Warfare deals with the terrorism occurring on the four dimensions (land, sea, air & space) whereas Cyber Warfare deals with the 5th dimension i.e. Cyber Space. The use of the Internet space for terrorist purposes creates both challenges and opportunities in the fight against terrorism. This paper is a review on Cyber warfare as it has several benefits over Conventional warfare such as easier identification of crucial nodes & links; law enforcement agencies will get help and support to counter terrorism attacks.

Keywords: Data mining, Social connections, Social network analysis, Investigative data mining, Terrorist network mining, Terrorist using social media, Graph theory.