The SHB seminar on November 5th was kicked off by Tom Holt, who’s discovered a robust underground market in identity documents that are counterfeit or fraudulently obtained. He’s been scraping both websites and darkweb sites for data and analysing how people go about finding, procuring and using such credentials. Most vendors were single-person operators although many operate within affiliate programs; many transactions involved cryptocurrency; many involve generating pdfs that people can print at home and that are good enough for young people to drink alcohol. Curiously, open web products seem to cost twice as much as dark web products.

Next was Jack Hughes, who has been studying the contract system introduced by hackforums in 2018 and made mandatory the following year. This enabled him to analyse crime forum behaviour before and during the covid-19 era. How do new users become active, and build up trust? How does it evolve? He collected 200,000 transactions and analysed them. The contract mandate stifled growth quickly, leading to a first peak; covid caused a second. The market was already centralised, and became more so with the pandemic. However contracts are getting done faster, and the main activity is currency exchange: it seems to be working as a cash-out market.

Anita Lavorgna has been studying the discourse of groups who oppose public mask mandates. Like the antivaxx movement, this can draw in fringe groups and become a public-health issue. She collected 23654 tweets from February to June 2020. There’s a diverse range of voices from different places on the political spectrum but with a transversal theme of freedom from government interference. Groups seek strength in numbers and seek to ally into movements, leading to the mask becoming a symbol of political identity construction. Anita found very little interaction between the different groups: only 144 messages in total.

Simon Parkin has been working on how we can push back on bad behaviours online while they are linked with good behaviours that we wish to promote. Precision is hard as many of the desirable behaviours are not explicitly recognised as such, and as many behaviours arise as a combination of personal incentives and context. The best way forward is around usability engineering – making the desired behaviours easier.

Bruce Schneier was the final initial speaker, and his topic was covid apps. The initial rush of apps that arrived in March through June have known issues around false positives and false negatives. We’ve also used all sorts of other tools, such as analysis of Google maps to measure lockdown compliance. The third thing is the idea of an immunity passport, saying you’ve had the disease, or a vaccine. That will have the same issues as the fake IDs that Tom talked about. Finally, there’s compliance tracking, where your phone monitors you. The usual countermeasures apply: consent, minimisation, infosec, etc., though the trade-offs might be different for a while. A further bunch of issues concern home working and the larger attack surface that many firms have as a result of unfamiliar tools, less resistance to being tols to do things etc.

The discussion started on fake ID; Tom hasn’t yet done test purchases, and might look at fraudulently obtained documents in the future, as opposed to completely counterfeit ones. Is hackforums helping drug gangs turn paper into coin? This is not clear; more is around cashing out cybercrime rather than street crime. There followed discussion by Anita of how to analyse corpora of tweets, and the implications for policy in real life. Things are made more difficult by the fact that discussions drift off into other platforms we don’t monitor. Another topic was the interaction of fashion: where some people wear masks or not as a political statement, many more buy masks that get across a more targeted statement. Fashion is really powerful, and tends to be overlooked by people in our field. Usability research perhaps focuses too much on the utilitarian economics, and is a bit of a blunt instrument. Another example related to covid is the growing push for monitoring software on employees’ home computers. Unfortunately Uber and Lyft bought a referendum result that enables them to not treat their staff in California as employees, so the regulation of working hours at home will probably fall to the EU. Can we perhaps make some input into what that should look like? Another issue with the pandemic is the effect on information security markets: why should people buy corporate firewalls when their staff are all over the place? And to what extent will some of these changes be permanent, if people work from home more? Another thread of discussion was how the privacy properties of covid apps make it hard for people to make risk-management decisions. The apps appear ineffective because they were designed to do privacy rather than to do public health, in various subtle ways; giving people low-grade warnings which do not require any action appear to be an attempt to raise public awareness, like mask mandates, rather than an effective attempt to get exposed individuals to isolate. Apps that check people into venues have their own issues and appear to be largely security theatre. Security theatre comes into its own where the perceived risk is much greater than the actual risk; covid is the opposite. What can be done in this case? Targeted warnings? Humour? What might happen when fatigue sets in? People will compromise compliance to make their lives bearable. That can be managed to some extent in institutions like universities, but in society it will be harder. We ended up with the suggestion that the next SHB seminar should be in February, which should be the low point; after that we can look forward to things getting better, and hopefully to a meeting in person in Cambridge on June 3-4 2021.