Security in Numbers

Big Data is profoundly changing the way we understand and shape our world. Its potential as a force for good threatens be overshadowed, though, by its role in establishing crime on an industrial scale. But there are upsides to the connected world.

- Marc Goodman

TECH GEEKS AND SHOWOFFS are the kinds of people we might think of as archetypal early adopters. But we’d be wrong: the real early adopters are people we call crooks.

Exponential growth in technology has been paralleled by a rise in big crime. And automation has led to automated crime, says global security expert and futurist Marc Goodman. The keynote speaker at Investec Private Banking’s launch of its #MoreThanData campaign, Goodman had as his theme the future of security and data in a connected world.

Crime in the old days was a pretty simple affair, according to Goodman. “You hide in a dark alley, wear a disguise, hold out a knife or a gun and say, ‘Stick ’em up and give me your wallet.’”

Advantages of the old crime business: you could launch very quickly, start-up costs were low, you could be your own boss, work outdoors and there was no regulation, no permits and no taxes. The big challenge for this otherwise good business model was scale. “You can only rob so many people a day.”

Happily, there was a solution at hand: technology. The railways, for instance, allowed two or three hundred people at a time to be robbed.

Today, the Internet has increased that scale to unimaginable levels.

Examples quoted by Goodman include:

Large American retailer Target suffered a data breach two years ago in which 110 million accounts were compromised. “One-third of America became a crime without an attack.”

Yahoo was breached and a billion accounts were hacked.

A group in Russia that was able to steal 1,2 billion logon credentials and passwords.

In the first billion-dollar bank heist,Russian criminals broke into a hundred different banks around the world.