Just got word that my talk Suddenly Psychic: Knowing everything about everyone was accepted at Microsoft's BlueHat Security Conference on October 16-17th. Sometimes when you go blue... you really go blue.

Over the course of the next few months my buddy Nitesh Dhanjani  and I will be presenting our research on how the business, psychological and behavioral aspects of our virtual and real-world personas impact our security and privacy. In particular, I am excited about two aspects of this talk. The first is the opportunity to explore techniques that were previously available only to large corporations or TLAs (three letter organizations) to gain intelligence. The second is to analyze the impact of our findings on the financial value of social networks and propose advances to current business models.

TITLE: Suddenly Psychic: Knowing Everything About Everyone

ABSTRACT:
Imagine a world where you can remotely influence other people's behavior. This talk will expose how information about people in the physical world, coupled with voluntary information from new communication paradigms such as social networking applications, can enable you to remotely read people's minds to influence their behavior.

Topics of discussion will include:

  • Techniques on how individuals may be remotely influenced by focused marketing and messaging tactics, and how criminal groups and governments may abuse this capability.
  • Reconnaissance and pillage of confidential information, including intellectual properties owned by businesses.
  • Falsified profiles used to construct undeserved reputation as well as the risk of reputation tarnish.
  • Remote behavior analysis that can be used to construct personality profiles to predict current and future psychological states of targeted individuals, including discussions on how emotional and subconscious states can be discovered even before the target is consciously aware. This topic will be extended to demonstrate the possibility of criminal abuse and the enablement of economic drivers.
  • Decreasing the value of social networks through data poisoning attacks.

The goal of this presentation is to raise consciousness on how the new paradigms of social communication bring with it real risks as well as marketing and economic advantages. Perspectives on negative and positive uses will be presented in addition to academic discussions and thoughts on how to enable the upcoming online social age.

Update: We will also be at Hack in the Box in Kuala Lumpur in October