Assessing Racial and Ethnically Motivated Extremist Cyberattacks Using Open Source Data

Over the last twenty years, researchers have noted the range of violent and financial crimes performed by racial and ethnically-motivated actors. There is also substantial evidence demonstrating the ways that these actors utilize the Internet and various online communications platforms as a resource to recruit others and coordinate criminal activities. As virtually all aspects of modern interpersonal communication, commerce, and government depend on the Internet, these resources are a likely target for ideologically-motivated attacks. There is, however, little research considering the extent to which these resources have been targeted by racial and ethnically-motivated actors. This study attempted to address this gap in the literature through an analysis of the Extremist CyberCrime Database (ECCD), a unique open-source repository of cyberattacks performed against U.S. targets from 1998 to 2020. The findings demonstrate that cyberattacks performed by these actors are performed with less frequency than offline crimes. The implications of this analysis for our understanding of extremism are explored in depth.