Great Unknowns

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, says Ma

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: u 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.” u Yahoo was breached and a billion accounts were hacked. u A group in Russia that was able to steal 1,2 billion logon credentials and passwords. u In the first billion-dollar bank heist, Russian criminals broke into a hundred different banks around the world. u Prepaid debit cards were created with no withdrawal limit and within just 10 hours, the bad guys had carried out 36 000 transactions and walked away with 45 million dollars in 27 different countries.

The problem: cybercrime is growing exponentially, but unfortunately our defences are not. “Some of the best innovation out there is illegal. Whatever the latest trend in technology is, criminals are all over it.” Artificial Intelligence and algorithms are being used to understand our world because of their speed and sophistication – for instance, in stock markets – but they can just as readily be used for criminal activities that happen before we can counter them.

What can the individual do to be more secure?

For one thing, it’s not a great idea to post on Facebook that you are pleased to be on holiday. “According to an insurance study in the UK, 78 per cent of burglars under the age of 30 are checking social media before they go ahead and burgle a home,” he says.

Great skill isn’t a prerequisite for crime. “In the old days, if you wanted to be a criminal hacker, you had to learn how to hack. Now criminals have created crimeware: software is available that will actually commit a crime for you, no programming necessary. Crime is now becoming automated.”

He quoted the example of Blackshades – “For $2 500, this is a criminal franchise in a box” which allows users to attack and take over Internet accounts. Like “legal” software, it even has analytics, with a dashboard to show criminals how effective their business is.

The rise of ransomware (which encrypts all of your files so you can’t read them unless you pay a ransom to the criminals) is another increasingly noted phenomenon. “We have ransomware coming to smart televisions. And with the rise of the Internet of Things, we will have ransomware coming to all your smart devices and toasters and your front door will all be online and will be subject to ransomware, so if you want to get back into your house you will have to pay the ransom.”

Even wearables such as the Apple watch

can provide useful information for the bad guys. Combining these devices’ GPS abilities and built-in motion-detecting accelerometer with a global database of all ATM locations, criminals have worked out a way to measure the micromovements in your hands when you punch in your PIN code to work out what that code is. Electronic Internet-connected personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa have the potential to act in ways we didn’t foresee, he said. And that’s without actually even hacking into them. “HP has said that 70 per cent of IOT devices are eminently hackable,” he says.

We can fight back using measures as simple as improving password security.

“Fifty per cent of passwords are five years old,” he says. “Seventy per cent of people use the same password across multiple sites.” So, one compromised account could set off a domino effect across several of your accounts.

Acknowledging that company password policies can be a pain in the butt, he advocates secure password wallets, many of them free, such as Dashlane. He’s also a huge fan of two-step authentication.

And update your software. In a Japanese study of six billion cyber attacks, he says, 76 per cent of the time the hacks worked using a virus or piece of malware that was more than two years old. He also recommends using the Update Protocol found on his own website, marcgoodman.net.

On the corporate front, here’s the main thing you need to remember: 95 per cent of data breaches are due to data error. “You have to train your employees and your co-workers. Humans are the problem, but they are also the solution. Increasing the cyber-security of the workforce is, I believe, the single greatest thing you can do to protect yourself on the corporate front.”

Crime is global, so to combat it we need a global effort. “A South African police officer can’t make an arrest in Moscow or New York and yet criminals can bounce around the globe with impunity. We need a better system and law enforcement won’t solve this.”

There are lessons to be learnt from medicine. “Let’s use the tools of medicine, such as epidemiology and public health. If somebody’s got Ebola in West Africa our goal is not to arrest the person, it’s to help them, treat them, isolate them, to ensure that others don’t get sick. I think that’s a much better paradigm.

“People didn’t know they were supposed to wash their hands and that smoking was bad for them and so we had to teach them. We need a public education campaign around cybersecurity and we need new thinking.”

Of course, it’s not all bad news, says Goodman. “Technology can do some really cool things. Technology is going to bring two billion people out of poverty in the coming years. It’s going to radically educate the masses, extend human life, drop infant mortality by 90 per cent in the next 15 years. From putting a man on the Moon, to decoding the entire human genome, to sending a satellite to Pluto… if we can do all that, don’t you think we can solve phishing attacks?”

What’s considered the largest undiscovered treasure?

A FULL-SCALE platinum-skinned model of the Hindenburg stuffed with Nazi plunder, biblical artefacts, crates of alien space-propulsion gear lost at sea when the life-size replica of the Titanic transporting it tore its solid-gold hull on a gigantic, floating diamond somewhere close to Atlantis. Well, that or an honest politician.

Actually, there’s some pretty tempting stuff still out there, ranging from priceless Indiana Jones-grade relics to missing art (seven Fabergé eggs, for instance, worth perhaps R300 million apiece) to lost treasure ships laden with unfathomable riches. The Flor de la Mar, an as-yet-unrecovered Portuguese vessel, purportedly went down off the coast of Sumatra carrying “200 coffers of precious stones” and “diamonds from a half-inch to the size of a man’s fist,” which ought to cover the Dstv bill for a few months. Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, wrecked off the Bahamas in 1656, was first found in 1972 and divers have recovered perhaps ten tons of sodden swag since. But that still leaves an estimated 140 tons of missing treasure for the rest of us, assuming we can snorkel our way onto it.

Hidden historical highlights include the tomb of Genghis Khan, thought to be somewhere in Mongolia and to contain immeasurable bounty of both historical and remunerative significance. Further east, there’s the Heirloom Seal of the Realm. In ancient China, prominent families used elaborate seals carved from jade to print their names. The Heirloom Seal was fashioned from a famous piece of jade in 221 BC and eventually became a talisman of sorts, conferring legitimacy upon China’s rulers. So important was the seal that it was once the object of armed conflict between rival kingdoms. Alas, it’s been lost for more than a millennium. Find that, and maybe you can claim all of China for yourself. Can’t hurt to put it in your saved searches on ebay, anyway.

Where’s the safest place to live, in terms of avoiding natural disasters?

How long can you hold your breath? It seems to us you’d be best off suspended at some depth underwater, safely beneath hurricanes and tsunamis, insulated from earthquakes, immune to mudslides, and at reduced risk from forest fires.

Assuming, however, that you’re talking about places that are composed of actual earth, experts have a few more realistic suggestions. Statistically, your biggest threat is storms, which accounted for 40 per cent of naturaldisaster deaths between 1995 and 2015 according to a report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

So where are there the fewest major storms? Those who thrive in chilly conditions should head to places like Finland, Estonia or Iceland, which are all too far north and east to be at risk for Atlantic hurricanes and too butt-ass cold for tornadoes to form. Conversely, if hot, dry weather is your thing, grab your sunblock, learn how to say “I’m Canadian, eh” in Arabic, and settle in somewhere like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. “They’re deserts so they don’t get much weather to begin with, except for occasional dust storms,” says Greg Forbes, tornado and severe-weather expert for The Weather Channel.

If those two extremes are too extreme, Singapore is an interesting compromise. It has a tropical climate, but thanks to its position roughly astride the equator, is safe from harsh weather. Storms must be distinctly north or south of the equator in order to spin up to strength. “On the equator you’re kind of in between, so [nascent storms] don’t tend to spin at all, the air just tends to rise or sink,” says Bob Henson, meteorologist and severe-weather expert for Weather Underground. Moreover, Singapore’s a pretty intriguing little citystate. Sure, they’ll cane you if you step out of line, but any place that has hug-operated Coke machines and fines folks for failing to flush a public toilet can’t be all bad.

When were sports announcers first able to draw on the screen? Was it a big deal?

The Telestrator, as the onscreen scribbling device is known, was the brainchild of physicist Len Reiffel, who devised it to enhance his kids’ science show Backyard Safari in the 1970s. “I felt there had to be some better way,” recalls Reiffel, now 89. “I’d get up from my demonstration desk and walk over to another camera that was staring at me with a big easel and I would wave my finger into the picture to designate the place I was talking about. That was not what you would call fast-moving television.”

The technology gradually filtered out to local weathermen and sportscasters in the US before making its NFL debut 10 January 1982, on CBS during the NFC championship game between San Francisco and Dallas; the very game in which the 49ers’ Dwight Clark made the stunning end-zone grab known to this day simply as The Catch. It got even wider exposure at the hands of John Madden during the subsequent Super Bowl XVI, and evolved versions continue to showcase the dubious penmanship of mouthy ex-muscle-heads.

How big a deal was it? Hard to say precisely, but we’d put it somewhere between the discovery of fire and the advent of stuffed-crust pizza. PM