asal and rethemeyer - cyber cafe

Cyber Café Mini Presentation

Virtual to Material & Back Again

A start at looking at virtual contention and how it relates to “real” contention

• Focus: Politically Motivated DDOS attacks• Education and repression are a dangerous mix

and make such attacks more likely – And we are controlling for wealth and internet

penetration• Another interesting finding • No relation to violent contention in a country

BUT such attacks are related to nonviolent contention

Collecting data and looking at connections and discourse

• Social scientists have made headway on predicting terrorist behavior – if we have data– Need info on terrorists’ characteristics and their networks

• Comp sci can contribute through text processing to structured data and modeling – Event coding– Entity discover– Organizational & network data

Appendix

What spaces need to be addressed?

Space of Activity Example

Strategic communication – public diplomacy

• Beheading video (1)• Bin Laden video (2)

Tactical communication - Cyberplanning (Thomas)

• alneda.com, (3)• Google maps (4) • steganography (5)

Cyber to cyber (large efforts going on with this- not main focus)

• 18/11/ 2001 Nimda virus (6)• DDoS attack on Estonia (7)• the Oak Ridge National Laboratory attack

12/7/07 (8)

Cyber to corporeal

• Slammer Worm infiltration of Ohio Nuclear plant - Attack industrial control systems (9)

• Bring down air traffic radars (10)

Corporeal to cyber

• Destruction of equipment needed to connect to cyber and media world (11)