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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Shaping opinion via spam
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Shaping opinion via spam

Shaping opinion via spam

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Last week, India beat the US to become the highest relayer of spam mail globally. This dubious ignominy reinforces the economic damage spam and other such malicious mails cause. For most of us, unwarranted mails promising goodies are just an irritant. But obvious scams such as inheritances in Nigeria or winning lotteries continue flooding the inbox because people fall for such cons with alarming gullibility.

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Since such mails do not have a singular recipient or an action that can end the chain, they continue perpetually in the expanses of the cyber world. Many of the mails are deliberately crafted to “grow" in number. Such mails extol the user to forward them to others or else terrible luck awaits them! In a nation which believes that stone idols consume milk, perpetual proliferation of spam is thus ensured. This means the sender also forwards the entire list of the previous recipients’ mail IDs to everyone on their own distribution list, thus enabling “harvesting" identities of genuine and often socially similar individuals. The latter ploy is a sociological ingenuity as many messages are crafted to titillate a particular community—for instance, defence forces, expats, bureaucrats, scientists, students, etc. This allows development of powerful databases that are used to identify socially influential subgroups and precision bomb them with specifically developed “sales" pitches.

While the obvious and the prevalent usage seems to be for commercial value propositions, such mails can also be used to shape opinion. Studies have shown that multiple exposures to false messages, interspersed with facts, start to shape beliefs that are untrue. Such opinion-shaping tools can also be used to spread insidious allusions about individuals, companies, policy positions or even undermining the confidence of a nation by propagating a sense of disarray and dismay. In the Twitter era, readers seldom ascertain the genuineness of information received from the Internet. More importantly, the human brain is incapable of “remembering" the veracity factor of information stored in its long-term memory. So regardless of the number of citations or references, or the lack of them, most information is processed with the same degree of belief or disbelief; but seldom in shades between.

Such powerful usages are already seen among that most ingenious group of all—terrorists and in some cases, even state entities. Harvesting of targeted profiles allows focused indoctrination with much better success rates of conversion. It also helps strategically because groups indoctrinated in the same geographic location or communities act as ready-made buddies with less chances of detection. There is after all, safety in numbers, (albeit small numbers). Once recruited to the cause, such cadre can be trained online in a variety of sabotage and subterfuge. Al Qaeda has detailed films on the Internet that teach novices how to build suicide vests and the suggested targeting methodology to get maximum physical and psychological impact, among other such chilling recipes.

Other mails carry dangerous payloads in the form of customized programmes designed to bypass anti-virus software and cause damage. It is well-known that our adversaries have sophisticated cyber warfare initiatives which alarm even countries such as the US which spend far more on their cyber defence programmes than India can ever imagine.The ability to take out even nuclear reactors using a software worm moved from realms of fiction into harsh reality in 2010 when Iranian centrifuges ground to a halt. Incidentally India is the third-most affected country by the same worm behind Iran and Indonesia.

Contrary to what software salesmen say, there is no silver bullet for such serious risks. The filters and other heuristic firewalls can certainly sieve some such attacks, but custom-crafted ones get through them. Subscriptions to newsletters, advertisements and most certain of all; that forwarded mail from a friend, all find their way to eyeballs. The only comprehensive defence against such attacks is, of course, a robust cyber defence strategy with systematic education and awareness. This is a major challenge for a country which is embarking on a multitude of e-governance projects and requires to train millions of users on the basics of computing and collaborative working. In addition, proliferation of hand-held devices, wireless networks and introduction of 4G bandwidth will just explode the number of vulnerable devices and users unless a national strategy co-opting the state, companies and private citizens is put in place rapidly. As other countries are realizing, such strategies need to get the cooperation of stakeholders rather than merely issuing missives or guidelines, because they have a direct impact on the bottom line and cause major inconveniences. And none of that can begin unless the stakeholders realize the looming danger of this new weapon of mass destruction.

Raghu Raman is an expert and a commentator on internal security

Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

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Published: 16 May 2012, 08:31 PM IST
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