Predicting the future shape and nature of terrorism is becoming much more difficult, according to reinsurer Pool Re’s chief underwriting officer.
Recent Daesh-inspired attacks on British soil show that terrorists are using ever more crude means to carry out their acts, but the internet and the dark web may be one of the most difficult battlegrounds yet.
Speaking at an event after the Westminster attack, Steve Coates highlighted the “ever-changing nature” of terrorism.
“If you look at the things that have been used to [carry out] a terrorist attack over the last 30 years, from mortars, to bombs, to vehicles, to knives, to guns, to planes – terrorist tactics change in ways that natural catastrophes do not, because there are people thinking about how they can adapt to the changing behaviours of the counter-terrorism organisations,” he explained.
With the sophisticated nature of technology now, the internet and cyber terrorism have become of huge concern too. Earlier this year, Pool Re announced that it had held discussions with the government and the insurance industry with a view to adding cyber to its coverage.
“We’re clearly looking at cyber and we have been for about 18 months,” Coates said, adding that it has become clear that there is now a possibility of damage to commercial property being caused by terrorists through remote electronic means.
Ed Butler, head of risk analysis at Pool Re and a former SAS commander who spent 24 years with the British Army, warned that terrorist groups are improving in their use of technologies.
“When I was commander of the SAS over 9/11, I think it was fair to say that we had superiority over the terrorists in pretty well every single spectrum,” he said, pointing to technologies like night-vision and global positioning systems; “we dominated the information domain.”
Now, however, terrorists are “on par, if not sometimes better,” in their own use of drones, GPS, and night-vision systems, “and where they are ahead of us is in encryption and use of the dark web, which is very hard to monitor,” he said.
While a number of people believe that Daesh will go away once it has been defeated overseas in Syria and Iraq, Butler said he does not believe that will be the case. What we are likely to see is a much more “virtual caliphate” that will operate not just in the ungoverned spaces created by unstable states, “but also the ungoverned space of the internet and the dark web in particular,” he said.
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