Infocrime is putting your business at risk

Threat intelligence will be a key weapon in the battle against cybercrime.

Organisations rely on data to make better business decisions, but when that data is not reliable or secure, those businesses could be making catastrophic decisions without even knowing it. When a criminal deliberately manipulates that data to unduly influence and seek benefit from the resulting behaviour, it is known as infocrime.

There is an emerging focus on infocrime rather than traditional cyber attacks. In the latter, criminals aim to covertly penetrate an organisation, steal information or funds, and escape undetected.

Infocrime is an extremely effective way for cybercriminals to achieve their goals, which include sabotage and market manipulation. Common examples include an attacker hacking into a company’s website or Twitter feed to spread misinformation and thus create doubt in the minds of the public or other businesses.

Cybercriminals may pose as regular members of the public and post damaging comments en masse on key websites and social media. Infocrime can also occur via attacks on the supply chain, using trusted sources.

Sowing doubt

The future belongs to those who control the information. Competitive business advantage relies less on a system’s security and more on having the right information and data. It goes without saying that if your data is not correct your organisation can’t make good business decisions.

At the moment, data analytics are used so that companies can make better business decisions. But what if the data you are using can’t be trusted?

When automated decision-making systems rely on specific data sources they become vulnerable to infocrime. Cybercriminals can usually attack or manipulate those data sources more readily than they could gain access to the organisation itself. The automated system then makes decisions according to the cybercriminals’ intentions rather than yours.

This means that infocrime is difficult to detect and difficult to defend against. And it can be very effective over a period of time as the impact lingers and perceptions are changed.

It’s all about creating doubt in the mind of the beholder, which can lead to damaging results. Information-based hacks can have massive monetary impact on the victim organisation.

For example, the Associated Press Twitter account hack back in 2013 reportedly sent the US stock exchange into a frenzy, briefly wiping out US$136.5 billion. The attack was well timed, coming just a week after the Boston Marathon bombings, and it included false reports that the White House had been attacked. As you’d expect, the markets responded immediately.

Who can you trust?

Doing business, especially online, in the digital era means organisations must figure out whom they can trust. Trusting the wrong information can have real-world ramifications that go beyond stock market falls. Businesses could fail, people could lose their jobs and, in the worst-case scenario, lives could be lost if the information relied on by emergency responders was manipulated to that end.

To avoid relying on incorrect or falsified information, organisations need to pool resources, data and intelligence from previously unconnected areas to create an even richer, deeper picture of business opportunities.

Revealing previously hidden insights, which leads to competitive advantage, only happens through comparing behaviours and patterns between sets of data rather than relying on a single source.

As big data becomes an intrinsic part of business processes, the focus will shift to using advanced information analytics to correlate data sources, and identify ‘trusted oracles’ and outliers.

A trusted oracle is an information source that is intrinsically reliable. It can be compared to the difference between taking medical advice from a stranger on a street corner and taking advice from a qualified physician.

Automated systems cannot necessarily tell the difference between a trusted source and one that has been compromised.

The future is about recognising new approaches to human and machine interaction. And it’s about using data and intelligence in real time to improve decision-making, enabling speedy positive outcomes and results.

Fighting back

Threat intelligence will be a key weapon in the battle against cybercrime. As the speed and the variety of digital threats increase, organisations will find they have less time to react to potential breaches. This is where threat intelligence comes in - it is an early-warning system that gives organisations advance notice of potential risks.

There are so many factors to consider when it comes to understanding where the next threat will come from. In an environment where information has exploded and big data is the norm, there are more hiding places and vulnerabilities than ever before.

Keeping track of and protecting against all the relevant threats is a massive undertaking that is only going to become more complex. Businesses must employ threat intelligence now or risk being unprepared for the next wave of cybercrime.

BAE Systems Applied Intelligence suggests businesses follow four steps to ensure data integrity and to counter the next generation of cybercrime:

• Assess and understand your organisation’s reliance on external data, particularly any data involved in critical decision-making.
• Diversify data sources and question outlier events.
• Implement a 'sanity check' routine into any critical decision processes: can you rely on this data or are there better sources?
• Employ threat intelligence to track and identify potential issues.