Abstract Large-scale cyber attacks are increasing at an alarming rate around the world. These attacks are often being linked to the widely publicized and popularized threat of cyber terrorism. However, cyber terrorism is a relatively young field of research and the terminology, much like its parent term, ‘terrorism’, is still not adequately defined or congruently applied. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the definition of ‘cyber terrorism’ and proposes a new universally-applicable definition and taxonomy. The new definition is derived from detailed analyses of existing definitions in the publicly available literature, which includes all of the key commonalities identified in accordance with the newly proposed taxonomy (i.e. actor, motive, intent, means, effect, and target). This new approach to defining cyber terrorism provides a common understanding of the broader threat for policy standardization, global collaboration, and research, whilst allowing for unique subsets of cyber terrorism to be defined for specific legal or specialty applications.

中文翻译：

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网络恐怖主义：同质化的分类和定义

摘要 大规模网络攻击在全球范围内以惊人的速度增加。这些攻击通常与广泛宣传和流行的网络恐怖主义威胁有关。然而，网络恐怖主义是一个相对年轻的研究领域，其术语与其母术语“恐怖主义”非常相似，仍未得到充分定义或一致应用。本文对“网络恐怖主义”的定义进行了比较分析，并提出了一个新的普遍适用的定义和分类法。新定义源自对公开文献中现有定义的详细分析，其中包括根据新提议的分类法确定的所有关键共性（即行为者、动机、意图、手段、效果和目标）。