BRUSSELS – Twenty-five years on from the devastating al-Qaeda attacks that shook the United States on September 11, 2001, European security officials are sounding the alarm over a shifting threat landscape. While traditional transnational jihadist networks still remain a persistent danger to the continent’s security, a far newer, more insidious menace has emerged: a nihilistic form of violent extremism largely organized online, led and recruited primarily by and for young people.
Unlike ideologically driven extremist movements of the past, this new brand of violence lacks clear political or religious goals. EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Bartjan Wegter described the phenomenon to the Associated Press as “violence for the sake of violence,” driven by a dangerous obsession with brutality and a desire to gain social status within closed online communities.
In a coordinated cross-border crackdown carried out across nine European nations in June and July, law enforcement investigators uncovered more than 4,300 web URLs tied to “The COM,” the shadowy online community at the heart of this emerging threat. To date, the full scale and reach of this network remain unclear, as Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, does not track formal statistics for this type of extremism. Disagreements over how to classify these acts — which often blur the line between ordinary violent crime and terrorism — have made systematic data collection difficult.
Official EU data underscores the scale of the broader terror challenge facing the bloc. In 2023, 45 separate terrorist incidents were reported across 10 of the EU’s 27 member states. While none of these attacks rose to the level of large-scale, mass-casualty events that defined 9/11 and early 2000s terrorism, roughly half of the plotted attacks were successfully foiled before they could be carried out. Still, six people lost their lives to terrorist violence over the year, and law enforcement agencies across 21 member states arrested a total of 486 individuals on suspicion of terror-related links.
Traditional jihadist groups, often inspired or directed by networks based outside of Europe, were still responsible for more than half of all recorded attacks in 2023, and accounted for over 70% of all terror-related arrests. What has shocked security officials, however, is the rising share of young people involved in extremist activity: roughly one-third of all individuals taken into custody on terror charges last year were under the age of 18, the vast majority of whom were male.
Recent high-profile incidents across Europe illustrate how this new nihilistic extremism plays out in the real world. In a 2025 attack in Finland, a 16-year-old boy carried out a stabbing that injured three female classmates. According to an internal EU threat assessment document, the teen shared an unhinged “manifesto” in encrypted WhatsApp groups, live-streamed his attack on Snapchat, and asked social media contacts to preserve and share his footage after the attack. In his writing, he stated he only wanted to carry out something “significant” and “exciting,” with no clear political or ideological motive linked to the attack. In another 2023 case in Italy, authorities uncovered a plot by a 15-year-old boy who planned to commit murder solely to gain notoriety among these online circles. His phone was found to store a large collection of violent content, including footage of past school shootings, assaults, murders, and child sexual exploitation material.
Wegter emphasized that these scattered individual attacks are far from isolated events. Over the past two to three years, the frequency of these incidents has climbed steadily, with networks coordinated online that cater specifically to young, vulnerable boys. These radicalizing spaces have repeatedly pushed individuals to commit offline violence, including unprovoked attacks such as the random stabbing of an elderly person with no connection to the attacker, he noted.
Countering this threat presents unique, unprecedented challenges for law enforcement. Unlike older extremist networks that left clear paper or investigation trails, most of these young radicals have no prior criminal records. Their radicalization and planning take place almost entirely online, often hidden behind end-to-end encryption in closed, private communities, making surveillance and intervention extremely difficult.
One of the most high-risk groups currently on security agencies’ watchlists is the network 764, originally founded by American high school dropout Bradley Cadenhead, who is currently serving an 80-year prison sentence for child pornography and sexual offenses. Despite Cadenhead’s incarceration, the group remains active across borders. Last year in Germany, a 20-year-old man identified as a leading 764 member went on trial facing 123 criminal charges, including offenses the EU described as “an unimaginable level of brutality and inhumanity” — ranging from murder and rape to child sexual abuse.
The shift toward online-organized extremism marks a stark departure from the threat landscape 25 years ago, when 19 al-Qaeda operatives, mostly from Saudi Arabia, entered the U.S. for training before carrying out the 9/11 attacks. Today, “the online environment, for all the good things it brings, it is still too permissive,” Wegter said. He added that the internet has become “a petri dish for the connection between different threats” that allows disparate radicalized individuals to connect and mobilize.
The rise of artificial intelligence has only amplified these risks, security officials warn. Europol reports that bad actors are already leveraging AI tools to create and edit extremist propaganda, including convincing deepfakes, shareable memes, and GIFs that spread violent messaging. AI-powered bots are used to scale up recruitment of new members and spread terrorist ideologies, while AI tools are even used to help attackers research and plan attacks. “The kind of violent content, violence inciting content, propaganda, manuals, tactics, everything that is available, is very much amplified by AI,” Wegter explained.
The push for stronger law enforcement digital tools has sparked ongoing debate, with privacy advocates arguing that individuals hold a fundamental right to communicate free from unwarranted government surveillance. These critics warn that new surveillance powers and the growing use of spyware by authorities and tech companies erode long-standing privacy protections. But Wegter argued that law enforcement must adapt to the changing nature of the threat. Currently, 85% of all terror investigations now involve digital evidence, he noted, meaning regulatory and investigative frameworks must be updated to match the current threat landscape.
For the EU, addressing this borderless threat requires closer cross-border and international cooperation, particularly with countries that these online networks use as operational rear bases. “Because what happens outside our borders impacts on our security,” Wegter said, including violent content that is amplified online and reaches vulnerable young people across the continent.