Phishing and the Strength of Weak Ties
People store and share large swaths of personal data on the internet nowadays. They input bank accounts, credit cards, passwords, travel details, personal information, including the extent of their relationships to other people and places, all online. The reasoning behind this, at least on the surface, is to make our lives easier, to simplify our routines and to condense our worries. The internet has largely succeeded in streamlining modern communication and accelerating the transfer of ideas, but this shift has had many unintended consequences. The growth of our communication network has left most people susceptible to breaches of privacy and information. We have a network so large and dense, there is room for imposters to enter the network under the guise of someone you might know to infiltrate your circle and exploit what you have. The interconnectedness of our social and online networks leaves users of the network and their information in a vulnerable position. There are an increasing number of internet savvy individuals or groups, according to Quinn Norton of The Atlantic, whose main grift is fooling people into knowingly giving out their sensitive information to a phony representative of a familiar entity. This practice is known as ‘Phishing’ and its becoming more and more popular, and its perpetrators are becoming more and more practiced.
For an example of what being Phished might look like: one gets an email that looks to be from your bank with a subject line that reads something like “Urgent: account holder attention required”, and your initial thinking is click the link and solve whatever problem there may be. You probably think it could be some sort of clerical error as you haven’t done anything where you would be expecting to have to interact with your bank. You are thinking the problem is on their end and no harm can come from following the clickable link. What you are unaware of is that banks will never ask you to enter information over the internet or phone or other situations where the identity of both parties in not verifiable. This makes sense after learning about Phishing and other scams, but this is a less obvious idea to tons of people especially of older generations. Most people have no reason not to trust an authority figure like a bank in scenarios like these. It is within that that I would argue scammers and Phishers are using the properties behind the strength of weak ties and triadic closure to ensnare their victims within their information traps. To any person familiar with the modern banking system it would make sense that your bank would never leak your sensitive information (and probably never even have to ask you for it), but if they are, they probably have a good reason. Phishers rely on their victims to accept this assumption that someone claiming to be from their bank who knows some pieces of the victim’s identity must in fact be from their actual bank. The scammer is using the authority of the organization to create a tie where one would never exist. You would never give out your bank account number or routing information to a random person on the street, but if that person were somehow verifiably the CEO of your bank you would be more inclined to do so. This is the logic Phishers rely on and it is important you yourself can think like a Phisher to avoid becoming one of their victims.