The New Era of Terrorism - Case Study Example

Forensics, on the other hand, has the objective to ensure that the attackers do not succeed. Therefore, from the game theory perspective, cyberterrorism can be considered to involve goal-oriented parties which even though they are not always rational, are driven by the desire to accomplish their set goals (Ichiishi, Neyman & Tauman 2014).

Moreover, the international relations theory in this study involves the application of a realist perspective to cyberterrorism events. The attacks can be viewed as acts by individual countries to survive in a rather competitive world (Al Mazari et al. 2016). Besides, countries believe that they have the mandate to take control of their own interests in the international sphere and therefore tend to participate in cyberterrorism as a means to gain information that can be used to gain power globally (Chen, Jarvis & Macdonald 2014).

Furthermore, the study examines the issue from a social network theory that looks at how people interact in a network. Basing on how random people are connected in the network, it becomes possible to launch attacks on individual computer networks through defacement since the ties between the attacker might be weaker or stronger depending on how they are connected in the network. Cyberterrorism has been comprised of various elements including hacking, the target of infrastructure, routine failures, and information technology as weapons of mass destruction (Conway 2014).

The attacks are however categorized according to the levels of sophistication resulting in simple unstructured, advanced structured, and complex coordinated attacks. These attacks can be of different types depending on the intentions of the attacker. This has given rise to the incursion, destruction, misinformation, denial of service, and website defacement. The intensity of cyberterrorism is gradually increasing and therefore it is essential to devise defense mechanisms to counter its impacts.

This can be realized through using both active and passive means of defense which can further be subdivided into three stages (Choras et al. 2015). These steps are effective in the prevention of possible attacks through setting up intrusion detection systems like firewalls, setting up incident management systems like automatic shutdown and compartmentalization, and lastly management of consequences from the attacks through means like data recovery and prosecution of perpetrators (Chen, Jarvis & Macdonald 2014).