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New Class of Malware Will Steal Behavior Patterns
KentuckyFC writes "The information within huge, supposedly anonymized data sets can be used to build a detailed picture of an individual's lifestyle and relationships. This data is hugely valuable, which is why many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data to help them build things like recommender systems. Now a group of computer scientists say it is inevitable that a new class of malware will emerge for stealing this behavioral pattern data from social networks. They've analyzed the types of strategies this malware will use to collect information from a real mobile phone database of 800,000 links between 200,000 phones. They point out that the theft of behavioral data can be much more serious than the theft of other personal information. If somebody steals your credit card or computer password, for example, you can just get another card or change your password, thereby limiting the damage. That can't be done with behavioral data, they say. Who would be willing or able to change their real world pattern of person-to-person relationships, friendships and family ties?"
This is pseudo-science FUD and that kind of data would be useless to a criminal. Really, how can "behavioral patterns" be more useful than credit card or bank info to a criminal?
one of the best tools in fighting financial fraud is people's behavior patterns. I work for a big bank and have several applications which are used for pattern recognition both across a business unit, and across a single customer's account. If you buy something in Rome, than in Dallas Texas, then in Istambul, your account is going to be flagged... But what if someone had your card information plus your geographic habits? There are plenty of opportunities to make fraudulent credit card usage seem much more legitimate to an algorithm, all that is missing is social information... for now.