"Many terror groups indulge in cyber crime to fund their activities
"I think its highly unlikely terrorists would use things like Second Life or World of Warcraft as they do not have the necessary security," said Mr Jones.
"Terrorist use of the internet at the moment relies on password protected forums," he added.
Said Mr Cochran: "All of the major terrorist treatises have been distributed through the internet so taking it to a virtual world with multi-player role games is really an easy step."
It was inevitable that terror groups would make greater use of the internet and the possibilities that virtual spaces offered them, said Mr Jones.
"There's more a chance of things like Jihad worlds coming online in the next five years I think," he said.
The visual richness of virtual worlds made them good places to educate recruits about techniques, said Mr Jones.
Attack pattern
"We can see groups emerging in cyber spaces and virtual communities that would be wholly virtual," he said. "They would organise and radicalise in virtual worlds and attack using cyber methods without becoming a real world presence in any real way."
Many groups were likely to use the expertise and skills they learn in virtual worlds to target key net systems.
Ken Silva, chief technology officer for Verisign which oversees some of the net's core address books, said such an attack could be "devastating".
"We see a continuing growth in the amount of horsepower in the attacks that are directed at infrastructure servers," said Mr Silva.
They also mentioned somewhere in there that at the moment they are just simply doing research in case it becomes an issue in the future. It is not like they are literally going into MMORPGs and searching for terrorists. They were also saying that these would be used for planning online attacks and not real world attacks. So it is also not like they are saying terrorists are some how going to blow us up via World of War Craft or Ultima Online. I think everyone is sort of misunderstanding what is being said here.