Crowdsourcing is defined as the fact of outsourcing tasks that are normally carried out by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call. This 2.0 strategy is also being used by criminals , which gives it clear advantages over the police.
Even the ways around the law are easier when you put intelligence 2.0 or what expert Yochai Benkler calls “peer production” in his book The Penguin and the Leviathan .
Criminals who don’t know they are
The same organizing strategy that has enabled things like Wikipedia, for example, can also collect data to determine the location of breathalyzer tests and view it on an interactive map on an iPhone or Android device. Some of these apps, which even send alerts when such controls are moved or reinstalled, have been DUI Dodger or Checkpoint Wingman .
The ability of criminals to distribute work is so effective over the internet that many of the people who are participating in the criminal act may not even be aware that they are doing it .
A very simple example of this is CAPTCHAs. A CAPTCHA is a type of security measure known as question-answer authentication . Typically the user is asked to type a series of numbers and letters that appear in an image. This authentication system prevents hackers from sending mass emails, so to get around this problem, there is software that sends CAPTCHAs to strangers at random so that they could enter them themselves.
But how do you recruit so many people randomly to work for hackers ? The incentive may be, for example, pornography, as security expert Marc Goodman points out in the book Crimes of the Future :
“He created dozens of free porn websites and informed his visitors that they had to enter a CAPTCHA to prove that they were over eighteen years old to access them. However, the riddle that the horny public was actually entering was the CAPTCHA criminals needed to create their email accounts for sending spam . “
Crowdfunding
The crowdfunding or micropatronage employing Kickstarter or Indiegogo portals such as incentives for new technological and artistic developments has also been rapidly adopted by the new crime 2.0.
For example, to circumvent the biometric systems of the iPhone, such as fingerprint recognition, hackers established a website called IsTouchIDHackedYey.com , where elements of crowdfunding and gamification were used to incentivize hackers .
There was basically a scoreboard that recorded who was getting closest to a $ 20,000 prize. In just 24 hours, a hacker named Starbug , from Germany’s Chaos Computer Club, grabbed the award, thereby subverting Apple’s technology.
As Goodman concludes, criminals take advantage of all the benefits of the network and the latest practices in the sector to make their activities more efficient and difficult to stop : “Crimen SA uses freemium pricing, gamification, participatory provision, crowdfunding, engines reputation, online training and distributed project management groups looking for the long tail of crime victims around the world. “
