Attacks on personal and corporate privacy top the list of business and domestic concerns in the online sphere, including incidents and attacks such as:

• Theft and identity theft
• Theft or damage of secrets and intellectual/industrial property
• Online fraud

The police warn of an increase in reports (as explained by two members of our team in La Vanguardia) of this type of crime, but “crime is like an iceberg: most of it remains hidden underwater and we only see the tip. In cybercrime, there is a high rate of unreported crimes.”

*Xavier Imedio (Cyber Criminologist at onbranding)

Why are crimes not reported?

• Reputational consequences: fear of losing reputation and/or clients
• Economic consequences: fines due to security failures
• Lack of awareness: not knowing that one has been a victim of a crime or that state intervention can be requested
• Beliefs: believing that the police cannot help or that it is not worth reporting
• Fear of possible reprisals
• The crime is simply not detected

The onbranding and Brand Care team works daily to provide solutions and improve the protection and care of both personal and corporate brands that may be affected by:

1) Problems arising from poor prevention and management of online assets (Security).

2) Lack of knowledge regarding the rights that protect us and legal responsibilities in the digital and mobile sphere (Digital Legislation).

We propose a solution involving 4 areas of professional action:

• The design of a three-way workflow:

• Reputation and Psychology
• Security
• Legality

The crimes that fall within these 3 areas of action are as follows:

Why are we vulnerable to identity attacks?

There are many reasons, but we would like to highlight 2 of them:

• Psychological vulnerabilities on the Internet: Each of us has several areas of relationship: intimate, personal, family, professional, and social; within the framework of reputation and personal security on the Internet, this barrier is easily broken, as on one hand “the barrier between the degree of privacy, trust, and protection” that should be safeguarded in each of the spaces where we interact and expose ourselves becomes blurred in our minds.

• Limited experience with new technologies can lead us to make mistakes that sometimes carry significant reputational, legal, and economic costs.

• Lack of knowledge about Social Engineering: manipulation and persuasion are two very old communication techniques, but citizens do not know how to detect them as early as they should, and when they become victims, they do not know how to defend themselves either verbally or cybernetically.

A few years ago, it was easier to obtain information from a person without them knowing they were providing it; whether through illicit access to their networks, their devices… Currently, however, malicious software intrusion detection systems have become democratized, and almost all users have a more or less complex system to detect anomalies; this is why “the bad guys” must increasingly

• To this end, “the bad guys” are increasingly turning to Social Engineering techniques (techniques for obtaining information that allows for an act that harms or exposes a person or organization) and OSINT “open source intelligence,” such as using Google Hacking (obtaining sensitive or interesting open-source information for the attacker via the Google search engine).

Consequences of Online Privacy Attacks

• Victims can be random or carefully chosen for targeted attacks designed to obtain information from them and thus extort them for something in return (money, a specific action…)

The most recent high-profile case is the August 2014 celebrity photo leaks:

More than 100 victims saw their privacy compromised by a vulnerability in Apple’s iCloud cloud storage accounts. The revealed information included images and videos, as well as text messages, calendars, address books, call logs, and data stored in phones and backups.

Those affected in this case included celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and her boyfriend Justin Verlander, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jessica Brown Findlay, Kaley Cuoco, Kirsten Dunst, and Jill Scott.

What do they want in return?

Our experience indicates that these attacks can be for recognition within the hacker community itself, for social activism, for economic interest, or for “romantic” or “professional” revenge.