This book maps and analyses the official British construction of the threat of cyberterrorism. By using interpretive discourse analysis, this book identifies ‘strands’ from a corpus of policy documents, statements, and speeches from UK Ministers, MPs, and Peers between 12 May 2010 and 24 June 2016. The book examines how the threat of cyberterrorism was constructed in the UK, and what this securitisation has made possible. The author makes novel contributions to the Copenhagen School’s ‘securitisation theory’ framework by outlining a ‘tiered’ rather than monolithic audience system; refining the ‘temporal’ and ‘spatial’ conditioning of a securitisation with reference to the distinctive characteristics of cyberterrorism; and, lastly, by detailing the way in which popular fiction can be ascribed agency to ‘fill in’ an absence of ‘cyberterrorism’ case studies. He also argues that the UK government’s classification of cyberterrorism as a ‘Tier One’ threat created a central strand upon which a discursive securitisation was established. This book will be of interest to students of Critical Security Studies, terrorism studies, UK politics, and international relations.

This is the first book to present a multidisciplinary approach to cyberterrorism. It traces the threat posed by cyberterrorism today, with chapters discussing possible technological vulnerabilities, potential motivations to engage in cyberterrorism, and the challenges of distinguishing this from other cyber threats. The book also addresses the range of potential responses to this threat by exploring policy and legislative frameworks as well as a diversity of techniques for deterring or countering terrorism in cyber environments. The case studies throughout the book are global in scope and include the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. With contributions from distinguished experts with backgrounds including international relations, law, engineering, computer science, public policy and politics, Cyberterrorism: Understanding, Assessment and Response offers a cutting edge analysis of contemporary debate on, and issues surrounding, cyberterrorism. This global scope and diversity of perspectives ensure it is of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, policymakers and other stakeholders with an interest in cyber security.

NOW AN HBO® DOCUMENTARY FROM AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR JOHN MAGGIO • “An important—and deeply sobering—new book about cyberwarfare” (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times), now updated with a new chapter. The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents—Bush and Obama—drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal and, during President Trump’s first year, turned back on the United States and its allies. And if Obama would begin his presidency by helping to launch the new era of cyberwar, he would end it struggling unsuccessfully to defend the 2016 U.S. election from interference by Russia, with Vladimir Putin drawing on the same playbook he used to destabilize Ukraine. Moving from the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese government hackers to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger reveals a world coming face-to-face with the perils of technological revolution, where everyone is a target. “Timely and bracing . . . With the deep knowledge and bright clarity that have long characterized his work, Sanger recounts the cunning and dangerous development of cyberspace into the global battlefield of the twenty-first century.”—Washington Post

Revised edition of the authors' Digital crime and digital terrorism, [2015]

Cyber security is concerned with the identification, avoidance, management and mitigation of risk in, or from, cyber space. The risk concerns harm and damage that might occur as the result of everything from individual carelessness, to organised criminality, to industrial and national security espionage and, at the extreme end of the scale, to disabling attacks against a country's critical national infrastructure. However, there is much more to cyber space than vulnerability, risk, and threat. Cyber space security is an issue of strategy, both commercial and technological, and whose breadth spans the international, regional, national, and personal. It is a matter of hazard and vulnerability, as much as an opportunity for social, economic and cultural growth. Consistent with this outlook, The Oxford Handbook of Cyber Security takes a comprehensive and rounded approach to the still evolving topic of cyber security. The structure of the Handbook is intended to demonstrate how the scope of cyber security is beyond threat, vulnerability, and conflict and how it manifests on many levels of human interaction. An understanding of cyber security requires us to think not just in terms of policy and strategy, but also in terms of technology, economy, sociology, criminology, trade, and morality. Accordingly, contributors to the Handbook include experts in cyber security from around the world, offering a wide range of perspectives: former government officials, private sector executives, technologists, political scientists, strategists, lawyers, criminologists, ethicists, security consultants, and policy analysts.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the international law applicable to cyber operations. It is grounded in international law, but is also of interest for non-legal researchers, notably in political science and computer science. Outside academia, it will appeal to legal advisors, policymakers, and military organisations.

Investigators try to stop a terrorist who is using computers to attack the United States.