Slur - Leaking for "Greedy Sociopaths" and a Positive Aspect

Slur is a new cloud-based market place to trade secret information for BitCoins. If you've got any information about other people or you want to sell sensible data of your company, this is going to be one possible service you can use.

Of course, this is highly unethical for the vast majority of cases!

If you want to leak information to unveil evil, you do have plenty of possibilities to do so without being greedy as well.

Judging only from its basic idea, this new platform will be a success. There too much people out there who do not have any feeling for security at all. At this point, I really don't have to look for references where people are greedy - just take a look at our financial and stock exchange system for a starter. There are millions of very greedy people out there, even trading their soul for money.

However, there is still a positive side to this: Security issues are getting a price tag.

This is good news for security people in companies out there: with the rising number of security incidents that almost take down even big companies like SONY or Staples (just mentioning most recent cases), you have a better position to justify security expenses.

In former times, security was only a necessary evil. The term 'evil' is going to fade away over the next years - I think. Executive managers have to worry about leaked emails with their personal opinions on co-workers, partners, or other companies. It's personal. And this works better than any IT geek, telling the CEO that the firmware of the expensive firewall is closed source and therefore is more likely to contain back-doors not even the manufacturer is aware of.

The white hats get better arguments with every new NSA/GCHQ disclosure that shows us that the services are not actually working for the people but against them. All of them. Security issues are not reported and fixed, they are used to spy on other parties. This causes more and more security issues being used by various bad guys.

For further opinions on this topic: see my next article.