ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses about media representations of cyberterrorism, and the qualitative differences between these and the representations we find in established academic and research-based debates concerning its definition and threat. Firstly the level of risk of cyberterrorism presented, including discussion relating to its likely occurrence and perceptions of nation and state infrastructure vulnerability, varied across the timeline. Cyber security experts are often cited as highlighting the potential threat of cyberterrorism based on known weaknesses within the systems they are attempting to protect. While the cyberterrorists were not framed as a source of moral decline, they were certainly vilified as the potential harbingers of social disintegration in relation to the potential attacks they could instigate using the Internet and/or IT. The research underpinning this chapter set out to consider whether the notion of Moral Panics provided a useful framework for understanding the discourse of cyberterrorism between 1996 and the present.
