Through a glass, darkly

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31 May 2013

At the Fujitsu Innovation Gathering in Croke Park, a selection of speakers tackled issues such as Big Data, high performance computing and innovation in technology to make a better society.

Chaired by Dr John Bowman, the event was comprised of presentations and panel sessions where the audience keenly engaged the speakers for insights on current trends and future developments.

From Fujitsu Labs, Dr Hirotaka Hara explained the company’s research activities toward an intelligent society. He gave examples of where crime data was overlaid on maps to show hotspots geographically, as well as chronologically. There was also rainfall intensity data that was being used to show danger points for landslides.

Dr Hara also emphasised the need for open data from government for general use.

This prompted a question from the floor where the panel was asked if these data sources and tools were likely to be used by criminals for nefarious purpose.

The question was addressed seriously by the panel, but alas, most admitted that they did not know but presumed that such things must be used by the criminal fraternity.

I must admit, I had to resist the urge to inform the assembled host that indeed yes, the criminal fraternity was not only using big data, but was so far advanced in its use and collaborative techniques that it risked breaking the analogy of a dark, mirror image of legitimate enterprise due to the likelihood of outpacing it altogether.

Over the last year or so, I have been privileged to have seen the research efforts of specialist teams in companies such as RSA, Symantec and Sophos into where the worlds of organised crime, hacking and high technology meet and become a maelstrom of dark energy.

One of the instances revealed in this was the ability of the hacking fraternity to build tools to allow the relatively unskilled, but with malicious intent, to execute actions such as distributed denial of service attacks, the creation of worms, RATs (remote administration tools) and general targeted malware. These tools for creation are backed up by tools for testing to ensure that they evade detection by the most common security applications. And finally, there are delivery options based on the operatives’ ability to pay.

These tools and services are backed up by varying levels of support, depending on how other user wishes to pay, and how much. Furthermore, there is a vast amount of data available to tell users about previous success and failures and techniques to adopt or avoid to ensure the success of their endeavours.

Among the developers of such tools there is a highly developed level technology and knowledge sharing to ensure the efficacy of their products. In botnet creation and management for example, there is often significant use of public mapping and geographical information systems to give the herders of such botnets the maximum level of data to facilitate the most granular level of control.

Returning to the conference, I was somewhat surprised that the assembled experts were so unaware of the level of sophistication of organised crime and their frankly pioneering use of such tools and techniques. But more specifically, this highlighted a key point in technological development today: there is still a disconnect between disciplines that can potentially hamper true progress.

At the European Technology Summit in Cork, Brendan Moran, data scientist, EMC, said "Security is absolutely zero in the big data space".

If academics and researchers are working toward a more intelligent society by uniting silos of data that can bring new insights through better integration with new tools and techniques, then security must be uppermost in their minds to ensure that their own achievements are not used against them. This requires an awareness of what is happening in the criminal underworld and how the criminal profit motive, bolstered by the other motivations commonly used, can spur breakthroughs in technologies that might otherwise require a war footing in the civilian world.

A failure to understand how the criminal world works could mean that the dream of a data-rich, human-centric intelligent society could have a decidedly dark twist.

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