Counter-Narrative Cyber Security Model to Address the Issues of Cyber Terrorism

Abstract

Terrorism is the imminent threat that Malaysia and the entire world are facing nowadays.  This has become a severe threat to Malaysia’s national security as extremist groups such as ISIS and DAESH are leveraging cyberspace to gain more supporters and sympathisers.  These extremists used social media to disseminate their narratives among the Malaysian Armed Force (MAF) personnel to recruit them for their excellent military skills.  Nevertheless, the current MAF counter-narrative is still using traditional media operations like roadshows, brochures dissemination, articles, and short videos in combating the terrorism agenda, which are less effective and time-consuming.  Therefore, this study proposes an enhanced counter-terrorism approach to fight this terrorism narrative by utilising the MAF IT infrastructure to focus on the social media platform.  The model was built based on ISO / IEC 27032:2012 standard, concerning three cyber-terrorism models.  Six military IT experts then verified this new enhanced model. They agreed that it is crucial to establish such a model and emphasise that counter-terrorism effort needs full cooperation with other services and collegiality.  This study’s final output is the Counter-Narrative Information Technology Model, which will later potentially be adopted to the MAF environment in line with the national inspiration in fighting terrorism.