Hiring Hackers, Brand Abuse and Twitter
Posted by Karim Dharamshi on Mon, Oct 17, 2011
Need a job? The globally economy is in shambles with well-paying jobs going the way of the desktop. Young and educated now means young and unemployed. Alas, even with the economic downturn, hack and wack global security firms, national security agencies and even organized crime are on a hiring binge to add staff to their payroll: that is Hackers. Their rationale is quite simple -- find out about security flaws and ways to exploit them. As Gunter Ollmann, of the security firm Damballa, states “this market has been around in a commercial sense for a decade, but in the last three or four years has been much more organized as a stand-alone business“. Just this year, Hacker Hotz got hired by Facebook and Comex, the teenage hacker who jailbroke iphones was hired by Apple.
Information is the new gold. The more a corporation or politician knows about you the easier it is to market to you and get you to buy into their brand. Therefore their databases are gold that have to be protected. Hackers that have been hired on by the “bad guys”, such as organized crime, well, I’m sure we can all imagine why they’re after our personal information. Identity theft is one purpose that comes to mind right away.
Of note, not all hacks have to be as grand as the Sony hit from a few months ago. They could be just as simple as hacking into a company’s Twitter account. And when that happens: what should one do? Hopefully your company is already working with an online reputation management company that monitors and protects you from internet threats. If not, you will need to research the many services available, ranging from brand abuse to social media monitoring.
Now back to my tweet…..