Along with Russ­ian and Chi­nese hack­ers, ji­hadists like Is­lam­ic State of Iraq and Syr­ia (ISIS) are the ma­jor per­pe­tra­tors of cy­ber­crime in the world to­day, says Amer­i­can cy­ber se­cu­ri­ty ex­pert Dr Dar­ren Hayes.

He was the fea­ture speak­er at a sem­i­nar host­ed by the In­sti­tute of In­ter­nal Au­di­tors and the Trinidad and To­ba­go Chap­ter of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Char­tered Cer­ti­fied Ac­coun­tant (AC­CA) and the British Caribbean Cham­ber of Com­merce. It was held at the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness yes­ter­day.

He is re­gard­ed as a lead­ing ex­pert in the field of dig­i­tal foren­sics and cy­ber se­cu­ri­ty and is the di­rec­tor of Cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty and as­sis­tant Prof at Pace Uni­ver­si­ty, New York.

In re­spect to ter­ror­ism in T&T, Hayes fo­cused on the Ja­maat-al-Mus­limeen, say­ing they had 20,000 mem­bers and had con­firmed links to al-Qae­da.

"Is­lam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ists have un­der­stood for many years the im­por­tance of the In­ter­net for spread­ing their mes­sage," he said.

ISIS, he not­ed, had even writ­ten their own en­cryp­tion pro­to­col. Hayes blamed that de­vel­op­ment to for­mer Cen­tral In­tel­li­gence Agency (CIA) con­trac­tor Ed­ward Snow­den, who had leaked con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ments from Amer­i­ca's Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Agency show­ing the ex­tent the US spied even on its al­lies, for that.

"Snow­den taught the bad guys that they need­ed to im­prove their en­cryp­tion. That's the bot­tom line," he said.

ISIS was ac­tive­ly re­cruit­ing hack­ers and oth­er tech­nol­o­gy ex­perts, Hayes said, not­ing that ji­hadist lead­ers "are very of­ten well-ed­u­cat­ed, have lived in the West and on­ly be­came rad­i­calised lat­er in life."

He added: "ISIS is a very struc­tured en­ti­ty, al­most like a coun­try. They even have a Min­is­ter of En­er­gy."

In his gen­er­al overview of cy­ber­crime around the world, Hayes said Chi­na was re­spon­si­ble for 96 per cent of State-spon­sored hack­ing.

T&T, he said, was not ex­empt from such threats with cy­bertheft, on­line fraud, ter­ror­ism, net­work and en­er­gy sec­tor breach­es be­ing the main ar­eas to fo­cus on. He al­so not­ed the new threat of drones, with Mex­i­can drug deal­ers now us­ing these un­manned craft to de­liv­er their ship­ments.

"Cy­ber se­cu­ri­ty needs to be taught at the uni­ver­si­ty lev­el here," Hayes rec­om­mend­ed, "so the coun­try can have peo­ple lo­cal­ly to pro­tect against these fu­ture threats."