CYBER TERRORISM AND THE FUTURE OF PAKISTAN’S NATIONAL SECURITY
Abstract
The new digital age is vastly restructuring the national security, giving the states the first priority to face threats with less similarity to the conventional conflict. Politically inspired attacks on information infrastructure are the focus of specific limitations of cyber terrorism, which are thoroughly explored in this paper. We discover that, the existing defense construct- intends to address state-base military threats are fatally inappropriate to this new field. The root cause of this weakness is a mere thought-provoking disjuncture between the administrations, which bear a duty of providing national security to the world, and the privately owned and operated massive mainstream of critical infrastructure. By using a qualitative content analysis of major world cyber events evidence, the current paper reaches the conclusion that there should be a radical transition to a resilience-based approach, which is based on the strong Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). We argue that cyber-terrorism needs to be brought into the national security focus of Pakistan, and other states of this kind. The paper ends by outlining a real policy roadmap to the Pakistani government, which includes the requirement of PPPs, a National Cyber Resilience Centre, and systemic legal and education reforms, and responding to newer issues such as AI-generated attacks and quantum computing vulnerabilities that will become the staple of cyber hostilities in the next ten years.
