To date, conventional wisdom has dictated that jihadists are neither interested in, nor capable of, carrying out cyber attacks for any number of reasons. First, through their collective experience in Afghanistan , entire generations of jihadists have been socialized to the armed terrorist strategies of bombings, hijackings, assassinations, and hostage takings. Second, even if jihadists have the desire to carry out cyber attacks, they do not have the capability. Most terrorist groups are strategically conservative by nature and prefer to carry out tactics, such as vehicle bombings, that have proven successful instead of utilizing an unproven tactic of cyber warfare. As a result of past experience and conservative strategic outlook, the current leaders of the worldwide jihadist movement may not see the value in a cyber attack.

However, this conventional wisdom may be losing its relevance. There are a number of emerging trends that indicate that jihadists might be developing a cyber terror capability. First, the al-farouq Web site maintains an ‘eJihad’ forum that contains how-to’s on a variety of hacking tools. The site contained information on how to acquire and use key logging software, how to accomplish IP spoofing, and how to carry out a denial of service attack. When combined, these technologies could be applied toward any number of cyber warfare tactics.