Dubai - Treading lightly should make it at least a wee bit tougher for hackers
Published: Sat 5 Aug 2017, 6:50 AM
Last updated: Sat 5 Aug 2017, 4:12 PM
In the age of over-sharing, a reminder that the smart thing to do is be discreet with your information, and not leave too heavy a footprint. Treading lightly should make it at least a wee bit tougher for hackers
Once upon a time, when I used to drive more often than I now do, I would need fuel, duh. But at fuel stations, I usually couldn't be bothered to walk over to the card machine - this was (in) Delhi, maybe five years ago - so I used to just sit in the car and yell out my debit card pin number to a bunch of attendants (bhaiyya-jis), who knew me, and wouldn't ever, I was sure, do anything malicious like sell my information to some third-party clowns. Which is what I'm told happens frequently, everywhere, no matter how tight the cyber laws, or how severe the repercussions. Far as I know, attendants never stole my deets. And if they did, well, pfft. Serves me right, I guess.
With time though, I had to deal with some appalled co-passengers who forbade me from being so stupid. (I thought I was being trusting. Apparently, trusting is no good. You pay a penalty for having faith in humanity). Moral of the story: I stopped being so free with pin numbers and began to understand possible destructive implications of that "1-2-1-1"-yelling behaviour.
It's not just something as obvious as your card digits that you have to be careful about. It's your phone, says, Ghareeb Saad, Senior Security Researcher, Kaspersky Lab. Yes, but isn't the Apple iOS tougher to hack than Android, I ask him, imagining I was safe from any malicious attacks. Even though I think who is so jobless to want to hack my phone? What's there to see?? Pop goes that bubble: "Both of them are equally hackable," he says. It's just that it costs hackers more (time and money) to break into an Apple device. Android is the most popular Operating System, he tells me. Something like 70 per cent or 90 per cent of phone users are 'droid peeps, the vast majority, in any case.
Phone attacks are all too common and Saad talks about the common sense steps to take to protect yourself from malware (see box below).
So what makes you vulnerable, seals your fate? Common sense stuff that you ought to know: sites you visit, links you click on, 'cookies' you 'allow', pages, people, posts you 'like' on Facebook, etc, etc. These little stamps of activity are your virtual footprint that hackers delight in. Think Mr Burns in The Simpsons strumming his fingers against each other in glee. Where there is evil, there is a way.
Saad can't stress enough how careful you need to be with card details, with information in general. He's talking about websites, and the user-delusion that they're not getting anything from you. "In life, you quickly realise, there is nothing for free," he tells me on the phone from Egypt. Collecting information is a big racket. He didn't say that. But the implication glares. You may be reading an article for free, but websites have got their crawlers all over you, your information. They know if you're Aries or Capricorn, who you stalk on Facebook, whether you prefer Top Shop to Ralph Lauren, what you ordered for dinner last Wednesday, whether on Deliveroo or Zomato or Uber Eats.
So, what happens with this information? Two possibilities: either its sold to telemarketers (hence the annoying calls for home loans, car loans) or to hackers, who can then work backwards from those basic personal details, figure out your social media footprint, get into your comp, infect it with not-nice viruses, filch credit cards details, and get a hold of those sensitive pictures you'd much rather keep locked in an innocuously-named folder within a folder within a folder. So much to lose by just giving out some information. Here's a tip: Saad, because he's careful, knows how it works, keeps a separate email id for online buying - different from personal and work e-mails. No tracing back.
Last week, a survey by global loyalty agency ICLP was doing the rounds. Basically, of 500 consumers in UAE, 68 per cent of shoppers felt like they got a raw deal - 78 per cent shoppers at a certain supermarket and 73 per cent of shoppers at this big clothing brand you've probably bought something from, didn't feel like they got anything in return for sharing their personal data. I didn't understand this when I first read it - what's to get in return?? Haven't you bought whatever you had to buy? What else is there to a transaction? People really need to ease up on this quenchless thirst for freebies.
Anyway, in that survey, 41 per cent did, in fact, trust brands enough "to treat their personal data with respect and use it in their best interests". The results varied between some of the UAE's top brands. Just 46 per cent of shoppers at this big famous store, and 39 per cent of shoppers at this other big famous store, said that their data was treated with respect and in their best interests. At this third (last, promise) big famous store, apparel retailers (where actually 0 per cent of people should waste even a fil), was even lower, at 32 per cent.
So the 41 per cent who are not paranoid that these companies will sell their information to telemarketers trust the universe enough that a nice lunch won't be disturbed by some call centre bloke peddling a new Etisalat scheme or a better data package than the one you already put up with. Or you'll have some Sheila from Bangalore trying to sell you a plot in the back of beyond to add to your list of things to worry about.
My colleague Bernd Debusmann Jr. did this story last year (bit.ly/1rT1azu) which said that globally 75 per cent of consumers have zero confidence in marketing and social networking companies. And yet, over 50 per cent of them share important details about their personal lives with these entities. Bernd quoted another security study: UAE customers were found to be among the most willing globally to provide personal data, with only 11 per cent of consumers saying that they would not give any data at all, compared to almost a third of consumers in Britain. Clearly, some catching up in the street smarts department needs to happen in these parts.
It was news to me, a security expert talking about how common and easy it is for sales assistants in shops to jam a USB stick into the shop data base and copy information (your personal data- e-mail ids, DOB, usual stuff) and flog it outside to some nice hacker types. And we aren't even venturing into the territory of state-sponsored attacks and the dark web, Saad says, frightening my daylights.
How would you react if bad guys got hold of your information and misused it? Psychologists at the University of Wuerzburg conducted a series of experiments. It's such a concern that research has been done to find out about people's physical reactions when they learn that someone's gotten into their photo library and seen all "those pictures".
Quoting the study: "During testing, psychologists measured electrodermal activity (changes in the skin's sweat glands), while users were most likely to break a sweat when they believed they had lost important data, sweat levels weren't that far behind when trivial data was considered lost by participants". Then this especially golden bit, which deserves a prominent if fleeting mention in a Black Mirror screenplay or a novel somewhere: "People's nose tip temperatures dropped when the loss of important data was simulated". Point being, I guess, that in order to spare our noses, don't go about telling every Tom, Dick and Harish your actual name and your correct date of birth. White lies are okay. When you have to be safe, they're really the best.
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com
Nivriti doesn't know anything about cyber security. But her phone is 'password protected'
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