Hackers inventing Next-Gen Social Media?

Is security research leading the way in the development of new social media applications? I think there's an odd intersection between some new directions in security and predictions from some of the industry's most successful VCs...

One of our favorite security reporters, Kelly Jackson Higgins over at Dark Reading, has posted an interesting article discussing a presentation by two security researchers at the upcoming Blue Hat Security conference (put on by MSFT). This presentation will be on the construct of an "emotion dashboard" that will collect the sum of an individuals' social media information to determine their emotional state and enable attackers to better exploit these folks via social engineering or some other method.

This is strikingly similar to the first prediction made at the Churchill Club's annual Top 10 Tech Trends for 2008. In brief, this prediction (which 95 percent of the audience agreed with) stated that all of the "data exhaust" that we leave in slioed apps like Twitter, Facebook, OpenTable and others will be combined in order to create more intelligent services.

It now seems that the security industry is ahead of the game by developing applications that could conceivably be used against us. While I believe the two security researchers mentioned in the article are simply doing a proof of concept, I could only imagine what an automated application or even a botnet targeting hundreds of thousands or even millions of systems could accomplish with this kind of tech. Step aside Storm!

Of course, tools originally developed by "hackers" have already be co-opted by enterprise IT. Vulnerability management tools such as those from eEye are a good example. If the VCs are already predicting this kind of thing, there's a good chance commerical apps that accomplish this are on the way, but it will be interesting to see which group - the security folks or the Web 2.0 folks - will turn out the better product.