This talk aims to address the risks associated with a recent shift of personal information control from individuals to service providers. It covers strategies that adversaries employ to monetise data breaches and manipulate social networking users behaviour for malicious intent.

A new set of business models and revenue opportunities emerge oriented towards easing individual work and enhancing well-being, based on data harvested about individual behaviour. Extant literature reports on the advantages offered by the crowd intelligence embedded in social networking sites (SNS).

Despite the lucrative advantages, the nature of social intelligence and SNS –generated big data creates fundamental challenges with respect to the techniques and applications relying on the objectivity and accuracy of social big data.

Governments are concerned about the assurance of algorithm accountability, while providers seek solutions to computation speed, energy performance, individual information privacy, data security, system compatibility and scalability.

Recurring threats of information loss and the arrival of GDPR have put further emphasis on the importance of privacy preservation and information security assurance. More recently the malicious manipulation of social big data has manifested itself on social networks in the political arena, influencing political decisions at individual level.

This lecture is delivered by Professor Vladlena Benson. Vladlena is Chair in Cybersecurity, Director of the Cybersecurity and Criminology Research Centre, in the School of Computing and Engineering.