Virtual terrorismInterview with "Virtual Terror" author Daniel Wagner

By Russell Whitehouse

Published 23 January 2019

“One of the characteristics of Virtual Terrorism is that it allows countries like North Korea (and Iran) to punch well above their weight in the cyber arena, and conduct their own form of ‘diplomacy’ on the cyber battlefield. These countries have already attacked the U.S. and other countries – all countries with the capability to do so, do so,” says Daniel Wagner. “The best way to fight it is to help ensure that as many people as possible understand what it is, what some of the challenges are in fighting it, and what can we do about it.”

Daniel Wagner is is the founder of Country Risk Solutions and managing director of Risk Cooperative. He has three decades of experience managing cross-border risk, including fifteen years of underwriting experience with AIG, GE, the Asian Development Bank, and World Bank Group.

Wagner is the author of five books – Global Risk Agility and Decision Making: Organizational Resilience in the Era of Man-Made Risk (with Dante Disparte), Managing Country Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide to Effective Cross-Border Risk; Political Risk Insurance Guide: A Practitioner’s Guide; AI Supremacy: Winning in the Era of Machine Learning (with Keith Furst; and, most recently, Virtual Terror: 21st Century Cyber Warfare.

Following the release of Virtual Terror, Wagner talked with Russell Whitehouse, the Executive Editor at International Policy Digest, about his book and cybersecurity in general.

Russell Whitehouse: First and foremost, what inspired you to write your new book, Virtual Terror: 21st Century Cyber Warfare?
Daniel
Wagner: I surveyed some of the literature on cybersecurity and felt that much of what I read was dated and based on conventional definitions of terrorism. The cyber arena has changed all that. I have crafted a new definition for cyberterrorism (“Virtual Terrorism”) and put some real thought into writing a book that educates people on what the phenomenon is really all about. My view is that the best way to fight it is to help ensure that as many people as possible understand what it is, what some of the challenges are in fighting it, and what can we do about it. The subjects covered in the book range from governments and the private sector to drones and robots to social media and some psychological implications of cyberterrorism.

Eighty percent of North Korea’s missile tests have failed, with a lot of those failures being attributed to American hackers. How soon do you think it will be before major military powers like the U.S. and China have to worry about their deadly hardware being hacked and used in terrorist attacks?