I remember, almost 20 years ago, a movie called “The Net” came out, starring Sandra Bullock. It was one of the first few movies dealing with information security and theft, and invalidation back in the heydays, when we thought the internet was a new brand of spandex.
Fast forward 20 years and here we are. The information highway was incorrectly named. It wasn’t a high way, or even a super highway. It is now an intergalactic, hyperspeed wormhole that every single imaginable information is being collected and stored, and waiting to be trawled.
Trawling is a term we often use when we want to find out more about certain people or things on the internet. We use specialised tools to help us create informational relationships, connecting the dots.
In Avant Edge, we do quite a bit of forensics work. Part of forensics is actually forming the context. If it is an individual, we’d like to know not just what’s in his laptop, but his online habits, the forums he has posted, whether he is active in the social network, who has he been in frequent touch with; and whether he eats green or red apples. So it has to be the CIA or FBI then, right?
Nope, because most information can be obtained freely on the net. It’s scary. You can basically vanity search your own name and you’ll be surprise what’s out there. Private investigators can now conjure up scenarios based on bits and pieces found on the internet.
Web Trawling could be another branch of information audit we will be including for 2013. With some customised tools, we can basically craft relationships of an entity as we trawl entirely through the internet.
Here’s a very scary proposition, illustrating our idea:
