CASE STUDY

I. BACKGROUND

The researcher Dianne A. Cuevas is a fourth year student taking-up Bachelor of
Science in Computer Science. Being a ComSci student, the researcher is curious
about the issue circulating over the Internet, the CYBERTERRORISM.
Cyberterrorism is the use of Internet based attacks in terrorist activities, including
acts of deliberate, large-scale disruption of computer networks, especially of
personal computers attached to the Internet, by the means of tools such as
computer viruses. Cyberterrorism can be also defined as the intentional use of
computer, networks, and public internet to cause destruction and harm for personal
objectives.

Objectives may be political or ideological since this is a form of terrorism
.

The University of Arizona (UA) whose mascot is the wildcat, is tracking and
analyzing the use of the Internet by terrorist to recruit new members, train supporters
in terrorist tactics, methods and spread propagandas.
The project called Dark Web is supported by the National Science Foundation.
The goal of this project is to collect and analyze all terrorist content on the Internet.
The project team is made up of one dozen UA professors and graduate students.
The Dark Web was able to collect and analyze Internet communication in English,
Arabic and Spanish language only. German, French, Chinese and Farsi Languages
were added quickly. The University of Arizona received $1.5 million donation to
study how terrorist use the Internet to train their supporters to construct, plant and
explode Improvised Explosive Device (IED). The IED is a deadly roadside bomb that
killed and hurt thousands of people in Iraq and other countries.
Hsinchun Chen director of UAs Artificial Lab, Home of the Dark Web project said
Our young soldiers, before theyre deployed, will know the IEDs through the
enemies eyes. The ability to study this information and to know where it has been
downloaded has led to countermeasure that protects soldiers and civilians.





II. PROBLEM DEFINITION

According to the researcher, the problem of this case study is the use of internet
of the terrorist to recruit new members and train the supporters in terrorist tactics
and method, and spread propaganda. The identification of the kinds of individuals,
who are more susceptible to recruitment by extremist groups, and what message are
more effective in recruiting people. The terrorist Website is much richer in
multimedia content and much more effective in creating an active community of
frequent visitors than the U.S government Websites.

III. PROBLEM ANALYSIS

The Dark Web project team has developed a technique called Writeprint, which
can be used to determine the author of the anonymous postings and e-mails. It does
this by matching new anonymous posting to the lingual, structural and semantic
features in hundreds of thousands of online posting by unknown authors.
The accuracy rate is estimated to exceed 95 percent. Market researchers in
many organizations are experimenting with the use of sentiment analysis to
determine the attitude of the writer or speaker with respect to a certain subject. The
Dark Web researchers apply it to find emotions like hate and rage in an attempt to
tease the social activist from the bombers. Terrorism experts point out that terrorist
are trained to maintain a wide separation between the political wing (recruiters and
propagandist) and the action wing (bomb makers, murderers) given this separation,
it is likely that the Dark Web is collecting and analyzing the communications of the
members of the political wings of terrorist group. Dark Web is not likely to come
across the communication of the action wings, as these communications do not flow
through the internet. Thus the Dark Web is not likely to intercept communications
about planned terrorist.



IV. ALTERNATIVE COURSE OF ACTION
1. There are some who think that the techniques and tools used in the Dark
Web project could be used in a way that could negatively affect our way of
life. The executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc
Rotenberg, fears the very same tools that can be used to track terrorists can
also be used to track political opponents. What are some of the negative
ways such tools can be used against U.S. citizens? Do you think that this is a
reasonable fear?
2. Identify three positive ways that this technology could be used to improve the
performance of organizations or to help us in our daily lives.
3. Do a Web search to find current information about the Dark Web research
being carried out at UA, including information about the budget for this effort,
the number of researchers currently employed, and any new tools or
techniques theyve developed. Write a brief summary of your findings.
V. RECOMMENDATION
1. The wildcats from university of Arizona was trying to track, analyzed and
developed some techniques to find solutions in their problems that cyber
terrorists cause. Since the tools to use of how to track the terrorists was the
same of what be used to track political opponents that Mr. Marc Rotenberg
fears about. Because, one of the negative ways tools that can be used
against U.S citizens are the different types of computer crimes such as
hacking and computer espionage. The hackers was considered to be an
expert, skilled programmer, rewriting code to customize and improve it but
now a days we might think that all hackers are irresponsible, destructive
criminals, intentionally releasing computer viruses, stealing personal data
and disrupting business. While the computer espionage is the act of spying
or the use of spies by a government or a company, like an example of when
a spy infiltrates the government of another country to learn valuable state
secrets. Yes, it is reasonably fear because it can compromise your system
and can results in effects that are disruptive enough to generate fear
comparable to a traditional act of terrorism.

2. The three positive ways to make this technology to be used and help us in
our daily lives are enhance the computer security such as passwords, anti-
virus, audit control software, encryption, biometrics, access control and
software firewalls; the intellectual property rights it is the rights to among
other things, the results of intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific,
literary or artistic fields, the three main categories for which legal protection
of it are the copyrights, patents and trademarks; and lastly the accessibility
which is often used to focus on people with disabilities or special needs and
their right of access to entities, often through use of assistive technology.
3. In addition to continuing to add data to keep the portal up to date
(something that was indicated as very important from our users), we have
been working on improving the searching, browsing, and translation
capabilities of the portal. As outlined in our initial proposal, we have
conducted periodic evaluations through user testing, and funneled
evaluation results to our system development efforts. Our searching,
browsing and translation capabilities were evaluated by users to be
important functions but to be somewhat clunky and not as easy to use as
they would like. Specifically, the issues have included inconsistency in
display, lack of sophisticated search functionality (such as Boolean
searching), and very slow translation.

VI. REFERENCES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberterrorism
http://montejoer.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/chapter-3-case-study-1-wildcats-
fight-cyberterrorists/
http://delapenar.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/cases-1-wildcats-fight-
cyberterrorists/
http://salguerori.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/case-1-wildcats-fight-
cyberterrorists/
http://rosalesal23.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/48/
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