Cyberterrorism: The Invisible Threat Stealth Cyber Predators in a Climate of Escalating Risk

摘要

In the span of the last year, al Qaeda launched two separate, well-orchestrated attacks against the United States homeland that would likely have been devastating had they not been stopped. Nahjibullah Zazi, an Afghan raised in New York, admitted to a federal court that he conspired to detonate a bomb in the New York subway system around the eighth anniversary of September 11, 2001 - and was just days from putting his plot into motion. Zazi pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, commit murder and provide material support to al Qaeda. This planned attack, had it occurred, would have been even deadlier than the July 7, 2005, attacks on the London Underground that killed 52 innocent people and injured 700, due to the larger, more lethal explosive devices that were to be used. The same could be said about Umar Abdulmutallab's al Qaeda-inspired plot to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on December 25, 2009.