Opening of the Invisible Battlefield Declaration of Electronic Jihad and Al Qaeda Remote Attacks, May 2012

Opening of the Invisible Battlefield Declaration of Electronic Jihad and Al Qaeda Remote Attacks, May 2012

The ABC News article "Virtual Terrorism: Al Qaeda Calls for 'Electronic Jihad' Video" focuses on a single video obtained by the FBI and shown to the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May 2012. In it, an al-Qaeda operative appears and is recorded calling for an "electronic jihad," a fight against the United States with keyboards rather than weapons. He instigated cyberattacks against critical infrastructure such as U.S. government agencies and power grids, claiming that their vulnerabilities were comparable to former air security flaws.

This "electronic jihad" is a modern form of jihad that focuses on destruction and disruption through information technology rather than physical destruction. A wide variety of methods are used in this "warfare," including infiltration of government agencies, psychological manipulation through social networking sites, disruption of communications infrastructure through website defacement and malware, and even DDoS attacks. This idea of the keyboard and code as bullets and the network as the battlefield can be a sustainable means of attack for organizations without an actual territory.

Senator Joe Lieberman described the video as "the clearest evidence yet that al-Qaeda is targeting U.S. infrastructure" and stressed the importance of cyber defense. Senator Susan Collins also said that al-Qaeda is trying to harm the United States in every way possible and called for legislative action to protect critical infrastructure.

The video was not televised; it was video evidence presented by the FBI at the Senate hearing. It was subsequently disseminated through the press and became an important resource for the need for cybersecurity policy.

In addition, Navy Rear Admiral Samuel Cox of the U.S. Cyber Command testified about the possibility of non-state actors such as Al Qaeda purchasing cyber attack techniques and tools from criminal networks instead of growing their own technology. Such purchases are made through the dark web in the presence of intermediaries and involve actual transactions in anonymous currency, ranging from the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities, the use of botnets to rent out infected PCs, the production of tailor-made malware, and the trading of government and corporate login credentials.

In other words, a structure has been established whereby terrorist organizations can acquire state-level offensive capabilities by leveraging existing cybercrime infrastructure without having to have their own research and development. This is the "cybercrime ecosystem," and electronic jihad is at the nexus of this dark economy and ideological warfare.

The 2012 incident heralded the dawn of a hybrid threat era in which cyberterrorism and cybercrime converge. The germ of a reality that has since spread to state-sponsored attacks and the emergence of cyber mercenaries was already clearly visible at this point.