Towards a Cyber-Destructors Assessment Method

Introduction

The momentum of the Internet would bring in its wake a series of problems related not only to the safety of the digital information, but also the appearance of pressure groups who take advantage of the anonymity of the net to attack everything which does not play by their rules, credos or other formulas who attempt against the freedom of people and democracy in the digital information society. The origin of these destructive behavior can be related to a legend of the European middle ages when in 1412 three Spanish knights from Toledo belonging to a brotherhood or fraternity called Garduña (Garduña, 2012), reached a small island of the Mediterranean (Favignana) and after setting down a series of rules for their members they headed for the current territories of Calabria, Naples and Sicily setting in motion illegal and destructive organizations. From there they would extend to the whole of Europe and the rest of the world.

Actually, these rules are still in force for these brotherhoods. Obviously the Internet is another tool at the disposal of these or other international criminal brotherhoods or associations with limited costs and with an almost worldwide scope of their operations. The main goal is always the same: smearing people, attack institutions, breeding conflicts, etc. Now from the technological point of view there is a wide set of applications and mechanisms stemming from the software and the hardware to prevent unauthorized access to the personalized information with the purpose of tutoring the privacy of the information, such as: firewalls, antivirus, software applications or specialized electronic devices, for instance. Besides, the legislation to tutor the computer users or other devices to receive and send digital information, it is very varied, lax and sometimes ineffective. The inefficacy is mirrored in an aspect which is not currently taken into account in the legislation for these issues, that is, the speed in detecting, stopping and repairing the damages caused in the face of unfair and unworthy attacks stemming from those who directly or indirectly receive orders from the brotherhood of their belonging. In this sense we understand by “brotherhood of belonging or medieval” to those members who use the informatics media and the Internet to spread false information with destructive purposes. This factor in the current work will also be known under the notion of “medieval brotherhood”. One of the features that characterize that medieval brotherhood is that all its members behave in the same way because their acts are ruled following a set of norms or rules, which are established and maintained along the centuries and which not have changed with the new technologies. In the era of the expansion of communicability it is easy to observe how the behavior of the medieval brotherhood stays identical, in all the geography of our planet. These first conclusions are obtained thanks to the analysis of the contents and the communicability in the social networks.

In this sense we have already detected the behavior of the young members (Cipolla-Ficarra & Kratky, 2011) who devoted themselves to modifying the counter of visitors in a website which works with Linux, thanks to open source software applications stemming from Russia. Whereas the administrators of the system, webmaster, designers, etc. must follow a whole procedure to access the website (two passwords, timetable to which wants to have access, captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) system to have access to the server where the website is to be found.

Figure 1.

Users protection system to access the server where the website is to be found (www.aruba.it)