SAMARKAND, November 6. /TASS/. Terrorism in the age of artificial intelligence cannot be defeated with yesterday's methods and requires new algorithms, Colonel General Yevgeny Sysoev, head of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Anti-Terrorism Center (ATC), said at the first SCO Plus Expert Dialogue on Security Issues in Samarkand.
According to him, "the rapidly evolving digital environment leaves the state no room for inertia." "Terrorism in the age of artificial intelligence cannot be defeated with yesterday's response methods. Amid full-scale algorithmic and cognitive warfare, staying ahead through technological and digital sovereignty becomes the only guarantee of survival and development," he stressed.
Sysoev said intelligence services operate on the axiom that terrorists' algorithms can only be defeated with more sophisticated sovereign algorithms.
New risks
The ATC chief outlined three systemic risk factors. The first is the "Uberization" of terror. "Digitalization has given rise to a 'terrorism as a service' model. Organizing a terrorist attack today does not require a cohesive underground cell: an ideologue, a financier, a hacker conducting reconnaissance, a bombmaker and a handler interact through anonymous platforms, often from different continents, while the perpetrator is hired on the darknet like a courier," Sysoev said.
The second is the "hypersonic speed of radicalization": the interval between a vulnerable person's first contact and their taking to the streets with a weapon has fallen from six months to a few days. Criminal syndicates and call centers controlled by intelligence services use IP telephony, caller ID spoofing, illegal communications gateways (SIM boxes) and voice clones of relatives and law enforcement officers for recruitment. Meanwhile, AI algorithms have integrated gigabytes of stolen personal data from banking, medical, telecom and delivery service databases.
The third risk is a cross-border legal vacuum: "the entire digital infrastructure of terror, from cloud servers to call center command posts and cryptocurrency exchanges, is deliberately located in the jurisdictions of unfriendly states, which use this criminal potential as a tool of hybrid warfare and block requests from law enforcement agencies."
Financing terrorism
The ATC chief stressed that "terrorism's financial circulatory system has also changed completely." As the investigation into the Crocus City Hall tragedy showed, terrorist financing has largely shifted from cash couriers and simple money transfers to stablecoins and anonymous cryptocurrencies. Specialized algorithms automatically split large sums into thousands of microtransactions, routing them simultaneously through dozens of jurisdictions and front accounts to evade standard banking controls. An industry of "money muling" has emerged within countries to convert cryptocurrency into conventional money, involving tens of thousands of citizens, mostly young people, in lending their bank cards to criminals.
The response has been to develop new financial intelligence tools. The Transparent Blockchain system developed by Russia's Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has been enhanced with artificial intelligence and behavioral analysis modules. The system deanonymizes complex chains of cryptocurrency transactions, identifies clusters of wallets linked to terrorist financing, drug trafficking and weapons purchases, and provides an evidence base for investigators. Mechanisms for instantly blocking money mule accounts have also been introduced, while mining and cross-border transactions in digital assets have been regulated by law. Several CIS countries have capped the number of SIM cards issued per person, while foreign nationals can purchase them only by visiting a telecom store in person and submitting biometric data.
In addition, Sysoev said, "large-scale operations have dismantled the telephone gateways of call centers engaged in subversive activities, seized thousands of illegal SIM boxes and millions of gray-market SIM cards," while state traffic-filtering systems automatically block hundreds of millions of calls from spoofed numbers.
Three pillars of security
According to Sysoev, an effective security formula is built on three pillars. The first is full national control over critical infrastructure, communications networks, domestic computing capacity and AI foundation models. The second is the intellectual superiority of intelligence services and their access to superior tools, including the continuous supply of advanced developments in big data, blockchain analytics and adversarial AI to law enforcement agencies and financial intelligence units. The third is joint action by sovereign states to implement the UN Convention against Cybercrime and dismantle Western IT corporations' "neocolonial monopoly" on managing the global information space.
Sysoev said CIS countries have weathered five years of trials, accumulating unique practical experience in combating high-tech terrorism and tackling high-tech problems, and "are open to sharing experience and cooperating with all partners to build a safe, just and stable digital future.".