announced it would roll out end-to-end encryption for its users to better protect their privacy, but the move could make the service more attractive to spammers,too.
While encryption can safeguard
information from data thieves, it also can block data protectors from detecting malicious activity on their networks.
"WhatsApp's encryption policy is a win for privacy advocates, but it will not stop the growth of spam on the platform and could make the problem worse," said Simeon Coney, chief strategy officer for
AdaptiveMobile.
"WhatsApp has always had limited spam control in place," he told TechNewsWorld, "and encryption will make detecting spam and malicious links with malware that
much more difficult."
Spam Magnet
Over the last three to four years, mobile carriers have made it harder for spammers to deliver their junk messages,Coney noted. That's prodded them to look for greener pastures.
"We've seen spammers move from
services like SMS, MMS and RCS to
services like WhatsApp," he said.
Not only does it cost spammers less to spew their rubbish on WhatsApp, but it's easier to find targets there.
"WhatsApp is a very friendly service to spammers because it allows them to validate phone numbers to see if they have a WhatsApp account," Coney explained,"so they can upload large number ranges to test who has a WhatsApp account and just send bulk messages to them."
Because end-to-end encryption prevents protection systems from seeing what's in a spam message, they can't guard against
malicious activity like phishing, account hijacking, spam and malware.
"It's simple economics," Coney said. "As certain channels get closed off to these spammers, they're finding other ways to reach their targets. They only make money if they get their messages through and they get a reasonable conversion rate."
Making Sense of Mossack Fonseca
Data
If you're a journalist and someone drops 2.6 TB of hot data in your lap, where do you begin to make sense of it?
For the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the answer was Nuix.
Nuix provides services for turning large pots of data into searchable pools of information.
With its software, which the company donated to the ICIJ and the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the investigative journalists were able to process, index and analyze the Panama Papers, 11.5 million documents taken from the Panama offices of Mossack Fonseca, an international law firm and a major
player in the offshore asset industry.
Much of the data in the dump was scanned documents, which were turned into searchable information with Nuix's optical character recognition software. Other
Nuix analytical tools helped identify and cross-reference Mossack Fonseca clients throughout the document cache.
1,500 Data Types
Nuix's search technology was developed in 2000 at the request of the Australian government. "They had a huge cache of Lotus Notes emails, and they didn't have a way to tag them, format them and make
them easily searchable," said Keith Lowry,Nuix's senior vice president of threat intelligence and a former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Defense.
"Over the years, we have been able to absorb a lot more types of information,"he told TechNewsWorld. "It has grown to
the point where we can natively ingest over 1,500 different file types and flatten the data and make it presentable to whomever is analyzing the data."
Although 2.6 TB of data is immense by journalistic standards, it's only a medium-sized data set compared to some Nuix has been enlisted to massage in its e-discovery and regulatory investigative work. "On
any given day, our software is sorting through petabytes of data," Lowry said.
Nuix gave the ICIJ and Süddeutsche
Zeitung technical assistance in processing the data stolen from Mossack Fonseca,but no employees ever handled the data, the company said.
"We didn't participate in the collection of the data," Lowry said. "We just processed it for them."
Source: technewsworld
For more on this, click www.technewsworld.com/story/E2E-Encryption-Could-Make-WhatsApp-a-Spam-Magnet-83370.html
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