Analysis of Jihadist's "Dark Web"

Sammy Elrom has published an informative analysis (part 1 of 3 parts) of the use of the Internet by Jihadist groups. The article discusses why the Internet is attractive to terrorist organizations, how the Internet is used and argues that this particular threat is not being treated seriously:

"The use of the Internet as part of the terrorism tools is actually the big story, much more than the new horizontal structure adopted by terror organizations. It has a much stronger impact on the war on terror than previously believed, because the West was not prepared to deal with neither the new flat structure of the reorganized terror groups, nor with the creative way of using the WWW as a tool that compensates for the lose of central command. Terrorists groups and especially Jihadists, discovered that the Internet is an excellent stealth attack weapon because:

• It doesn’t require field training (actually the training is already built-in the website itself)
• There are no special preparations after the site is up and running
• Changing the content and updating is secure and done remotely
• The technical support in minimal
• It provides an excellent scouting, recruiting and real time Intel tool

In other words, what terrorists need is a few IT professionals and a hosting server. The results of cyber war may not be as spectacular as detonating an IED in a busy underground parking, but the actual damage has the potential of being more disastrous and create more chaos, by far."

The Dark Web Of Cyber Terror – An Inescapable Reality