Ten years ago, the 9/11 Commission came out with a nearly 600-page report on the threat of terrorism to the United States and beyond. The report took the form of a comprehensive overview of modern terroristic threats, tracing the emergence of New Terrorism, the rise of Osama Bin Laden and finally proposals for strategies on how to cope with the worldwide presence of terror.
When the report was released back in 2004, the issue of cybercrime was hardly the front-page news story it is today. In fact, in the report’s 585 pages, you can count the number of times any discussion of “cyber” appears with the fingers on your right hand. But that was then. It’s been 10 years since the report came out and in the intervening years our world has changed not only in the physical realm, but also in the digital one. So marked are these changes that the authors of the original Commission report have called special attention to the issue of cybercrime in a new release.
Anniversary Report Warns Against the Threat Posed by Virtual Crime
Does an act of terrorism have to take place in the physical world in order to be considered as such? Or can something that happens in the virtual sphere have all the same properties of terror? According to a new report from the authors of the original 9/11 Commission document, there is no question about it: Cybercrime not only poses a terror threat, but a potent one at that.
The Washington Post reported that the Commission report authors have put out a release that both looks at the 10 years since 9/11 and also has an eye to the future. Titled “Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of The 9/11 Commission Report,” the document makes a strong case for cybercrime being afforded the same kind of security attention that terrorism receives. After all, as the authors point out, cybercrime is so powerful that an attack of devastating magnitude — the Internet equivalent of 9/11 — could not be far off in the future.
In order to protect against such a threat materializing, everybody needs to practice safe computing. This is particularly true for businesses, since they have the security not only of themselves, but also of customers to look out for. By implementing enterprise security measures, companies can take a big step toward firming up protection in an age when such defenses cannot be ignored.
