Hello everyone. I will be presenting a paper titled “The Extremist Edition of Social Networking: The Inevitable Marriage of Cyber Jihad and Web 2.0” at the 5th International Conference on Information Warfare and Security, which will take place August 8th-10th at The Air Force Institute of Technology. Below is an abstract for the paper.
Abstract: Within the Cyber Warfare community, there are several terms that have become very popular. For example: Cyber Jihad/Terrorism; Online Extremist; Twitter; Facebook; Social Networking; and Web 2.0. Collective dialog about the above terms, however, has not been forward thinking and often fail to predict how our adversaries may adopt these technologies. We are aware of extremists using the internet; we are aware that jihadist may be using Facebook and Twitter. However, we have been thinking like the mass consumers of these products that we are; not like the jihadist themselves. We must investigate whether an online extremist would openly use a mainstream social networking site and risk exposure due to the site’s large number and geographic base of users. Although there is likely a minor presence of Jihadist on Facebook and similar social networking sites, for the most part, online extremist have not fully adopted these technologies that we refer to as Web 2.0. When online extremists adopt Web 2.0, it will not be on those sites that society has come to love. They will employ the very same technologies, it will look similar, but the presence of terrorism in Web 2.0 will not be like one would expect. Social networking technologies have become free and simple to deploy, allowing sites to be literally created in a matter of minutes. If an extremist social networking site is taken down, another one can be created in less than ten minutes. This paper highlights how online extremists are likely to adopt Web 2.0 and the resulting challenges. This paper begins by introducing the reader to Al-Qa’ida’s use of the internet. Then, using Ning, the popular social networking platform as a case study, the paper then highlights the points that: (1) social networking technologies are very conducive to Cyber Jihad; (2) there will be no need for online extremist to use “mainstream” websites like Facebook or Twitter; and (3) the Cyber Warfare Community needs a plan to counter extremist use of their own social networking technologies.
For more information on the conference visit: http://www.academic-conferences.org/iciw/iciw2010/iciw10-home.htm
