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Abstract: Terrorism is a form of political violence that has been with us since antiquity. Over the last few decades, terrorism has been facing the challenges of cyberspace. Interactions and influences between cyberspace and terrorism are large and constantly changing. In order to achieve their goals, terrorist organizations use cyberspace to collect data, raise funds, and conduct propaganda, but also for the purposes of radicalization and operational planning. Scholars have widely discussed whether cyberspace has a transformative effect on the nature of terrorism. In order to examine the transformative or not effect of cyberspace on terrorism, we will analyze the case of Islamic terrorism and, in particular, Islamic State's actions in social media. In recent years, the ISIS has become very active in cyberspace. Specifically, many organizations and individuals are working on the name of ISIS and Jihad in cyberspace.
Keywords: terrorism, cyberterrorism, ISIS, Jihad, cyberspace, social media
1. Introduction
"We are in a battle and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media (...). We are in a media battle for the hearts and minds of our Ummah", Ayman Al Zawahiri, July 2015
The rapid evolution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as well as the emerging information society have led to a study of the emergence of possible risks in a society. According to the last count, cyberspace users are 4 billion worldwide, making its use important in our everyday life and necessary in order to achieve exchanges of information and data (Kemp, 2018).
Cyberspace is a domain of socio-political and military controversy, in which terrorism also operates (Bryant, 2001). There is also a darker side in cyberspace, which creates more and more challenges to individual and collective security. From the above, arises the question as to what extent and in what way the development of ICTs has affected the phenomenon of terrorism.
According to the existing sources after 9/11, terrorism is constantly envolving in terms of its characteristics and means of execution, but not to its objectives. The symbiotic relationship between terrorism and cyberspace is dominant and grounded (Hoffman, 1998, 56). According to Marshal McLuhan, without communication terrorism does not exist (Torres Soriano, 2008, 2). For terrorism the biggest failure is to be ignored...