Future Crimes - book review

If you have a smartphone or have used email or have been on social media sites like Facebook you should read this book. After all “600,000 Facebook accounts are compromised daily”. If you use apps to find your way or shop online or have used free wifi at a coffee shop or a bank, you need to read why it is almost certain that your data has been compromised. Data is like oil. It is precious and needs to be protected. The average user does not understand the way his or her digital trail is being monetized and used by criminals. Marc Goodman the author of Future Crimes (Publisher: Doubleday) is a futurist for FBI and adviser to Interpol.Watch his TED talk herehttps://youtu.be/-E97Kgi0sR4In Future Crimes he tells you how criminals could be using a cheap downloadable app to click pictures from your phone or how baby monitors can be hacked to spy into your world. After reading this book, you will never surf the net without wondering who is tracking your data and where it may end up. If you believe that you can search for every answer possible on Google, then you have clearly never heard of The Onion Router (TOR for short) that indexes more of 99% of information that Google doesn’t. Criminals do because that’s the doorway to the Dark Web.In the pre-internet era, criminals were limited to the physical location and could at best take a flight out to escape prosecution. In the online world can sit in their room and launch an attack that affects millions. The Target security breach compromised 70 million customers’ data. Target also analyses your shopping pattern and if you have bought 25 products that go into a customer’s “pregnancy prediction score”, they will know about your pregnancy before you have announced it to your loved ones. By the way they will also sell that information to others. Car rental companies have installed trackers that beam the driver’s whereabouts.In an interconnected world, we are constantly leaving digital footprints and we are careless with our location. Did you know that when you visit a site like dictionary.com to look up the meaning of a word, a total of 234 tracking files get tucked away into your computer. Every time you have used Google, you are leaving a footprint of “what” you want to know. Facebook knows “who” you know. After all we go on to Facebook and dutifully type away everything about ourselves from our work resume (I know you have also loaded that on LinkedIn) to our relationship status and moods. You leave clues through text messages, phone calls (your itemized phone bill is online) and more. This is what ends up with criminals and hackers. They know technology better than most of us.We tag pictures of ourselves. If you are not on Facebook, your photos are if you have ever been photographed with friends who have uploaded your photo and tagged you. When you enable geo-location tracking your twitter updates for example will let others know your exact location. This data is then sold to companies like Acxiom that in turn sells this data to marketeers. Acxiom has 700 million consumer profiles in its database with 1500 traits for each profile including health issues, pet ownership, right and left handedness to name a few. And yes their database has been hacked too.In an interconnected world all data is continuously vulnerable to attacks. This data is leveraged by everyone from employers, insurers and marketeers to criminals. Parents need to read this book to understand how their kid’s harmless online presence can be exploited by pedophiles.To deal with it, law enforcement officials and governments need to understand the enormity of the danger. Interpol has an operating budget of $90 million while the “narco-leader” Guzman Loera of Mexico alone had $200 million in cash in his home when he was arrested. Cross border policing becomes a challenge because of politics. A hacker database like Shodan is hosted on multiple servers in countries where hosting publishing information about vulnerabilities from power plants to wind turbines is not illegal. That makes prosecution impossible. We need new laws. Cyberspace is rightly called the fifth domain of battle (land, sea, air and space being the other four).The book gave me a chance to peek into the Marina Trench which is deepest known part of the world's oceans. Except that this book holds the deepest secrets of the world of crime. When you come back up to the surface, I can tell you things will never be the same again.---------Join me on twitter @AbhijitBhaduri