The costs of cyberterrorism for the national economy: United States of America vs Egypt

Abstract

In recent years cyber terrorism has become increasingly used with the globalization of technology and people’s access to high-speed internet. It takes place exclusively in the online environment, the advantage being that it offers an increased level of anonymity to users. Terrorist groups are targeting the misappropriation of social media accounts, focused on Distributed Denial of Service activities, exploiting communications services and banking services for fraudulent misappropriation of financial accounts. Cyberterrorism generates very high costs for the national economy, such as the involvement of specialists for detecting and correcting intrusion, declining productivity and income, costs of information theft, regaining the reputation of an institution or company, the costs relating to the resumption of production and the provision of services, the loss of information concerning intellectual property, financial manipulation using stolen information, the cost of securing computer networks and assuring them in the event of intrusion, costs generated by the time spent on recovering stolen data. In 2018 both the US and Egypt took action on these activities, the US modified its national cyber strategy and Egypt adopted the new law project to combat cybercrime. The main cyber threats they face are: threats of intrusion and sabotage of IT infrastructures, cyberterrorism and cyberwar, threats to digital identity and theft of private data, malware programs. The targets of the attacks were public sector entities, financial organizations, health care organizations, retail and accommodation. The reasons for why hackers attack these organizations are money-related, malware infected by emails, commercial and industrial espionage.