The New Face Of Cybercrime?

Daren Oliver explores the recent data breaches experienced by subscribers to social media and asks whether data harvesting is fast becoming the most virulent strain of cybercrime

- Daren Oliver

Cybercriminals were once shrouded in mystery. Faceless non-entities lurking in the murky environs of the darkest corners of the digital underworld carrying out carefully planned phishing attacks and unleashing herds of Trojan horses to help them storm PCs. Although it’s true that phishing and hacking remain a lucrative pastime for many of the world wide web’s underlords, it seems that harvesting is quickly becoming the new buzzword on the cyber security block and cyber criminals are cutting a more corporate appearance.

In the wake of the latest tidal wave of data privacy breaches that have swept the globe is the revelation that they were carried out not by shadowy underworld figures, but by well-known organisations that we have trusted and obligingly supplied with our most private and sensitive information, preferences and beliefs. But more alarming than this has been the unwitting participation of millions of social-media users in a worldwide data gathering experiment at the hands of companies that would make Orwell’s dystopian state of Oceania look vaguely tolerable. How ironic then that the premise behind Cambridge Analytica’s audacious breach of millions of personal Facebook profiles was how it classified voters and targeted them by using the OCEAN technique – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.