About 10 years ago now, I recall discussing my concept of internal civil disobedience, and insurgency with another professional – question, ‘just how do you cause widespread chaos by none technical means?’ – answer = employ around 5 individuals, place them on a bridge London (or any other City) over a major feeder road/motorway early on a Monday morning, and spread a few boxes of nails. The resulting accidents, chaos, and logjammed traffic would be enough to impact the City, and all for just a few pounds! Agreed, this is a simplistic, none-technical attack, but just consider the real outcome. Now extrapolate that to the chaos that could be, and is being caused by Drones – and considering they have not even been used to their complete and full adverse potential as yet, we should be looking to the future as to how these Terror-Toys will be leveraged in the medium and longer term, to say, carry explosives into the spatial area of protected environments (say Westminster), or to download their poisonous payload of say, Anthrax or Sarin onto their below awaiting public.
Of my two scenarios, the sad fact is the posed threat by drones is potentially the easiest to deal with, had/if Law Enforcement and Government bodies had taken/take the required action of registration, and control to remove the ease of ownership – agreed, it will not remove the threat in its entirety, but I hope you will agreed that the purchase of a drone is hopefully more controllable than a box of nails.
In the year of 2019, of the imaginative Criminal, Terrorist, and State Sponsored mind, we really do need to step up to the plate of futuristic threats as a scenario prior to them becoming a reality!
John is the Principle at Shadow-Intelligence (Si), partnering with PALISCOPE, BreachAware and iStorage. He is a Visiting Professor at the School of Science and Technology, Nottingham, Trent University (NTU) and holds the appointment of Editor in Chief for the International Journal of Cyber Forensics and Advanced Threat Investigations (CFATI). For the last decade he has delivered training courses in the Middle, and Far East to Commercial, Industrial, the Financial Services Sector, and Military Agencies, including the UAE, US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia (KL), Singapore, Argentina, and Sao Paulo
He served in the Royal Air Force 22 years’, specialising in Counterintelligence, working with UK Agencies such as GCHQ/CESG, and others in the fields of SIGINT, COMINT and Satellite Communications, holding appointments such as System ITSO for a CIA SCIF.
In the commercials sectors of IT/Cyber he has worked for/with Logica, Bae, T5, GM, Experian, Betfair, Palace of Westminster, House of Lords/Commons, TSol (Treasury Solicitors) and provided Consultancy to the Saudi Arabian MOD, TRA (Telecommunications Authority (Dubai) and the Military Academy of Malaysia (KL) on SOC, CSIRT, Digital Forensics and OSINT. Within the last 5 years he has focused on Geopolitics, with global expertise around the UAE and Russia, Anti-Terrorist Operations (ATO), Cyber-Warfare, Dezinformatsiya (Disinformation) and Maskirovka (Military Deception).
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