Michael Watt, The Daily Record Newswire
When Sir Walter Scott wrote, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive" he neglected to mention how profitable the web can be, at least for the ancillary industries facilitating the web weaving as well as for the businesses cleaning up the inevitable mess once the web unravels.
(I thought the "tangled web" quote was Shakespeare, too. Thank God for Google. The line, it should be noted, is from "Marmion," a "long romantic poem" outlining convoluted stepping out among the Scottish royals five centuries ago, further proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same.)
How much money is being made? It's hard to tell as there's not exactly an SIC code reflecting economic activity generated by cheating spouses. I do know that as a teenager I worked in a restaurant/bar that was connected to a motel next door. The cocktail lounge was always cave-like dark and the motel denizens never used their real names or stayed for too long. Both establishments did a brisk business and while this may not have been an ideal work environment for an impressionable pubescent male, the old-school soul who owned both places taught me a lesson they don't teach in MBA programs: "Tourists are fickle; love is year-round and weatherproof."
When it was revealed earlier this month that AshleyMadison.com was hacked and its members' personal information could soon be made available to anyone with an interest in such things - prurient or otherwise - what really jumped out was the idea that 38 million Americans had enrolled on the site. That's more than the combined congregations of the Southern Baptist, Methodist, Mormon and Pentecostal churches. This latest cyber endeavor to expose who is being tempted by the fruit of another comes on the heels of a similar event in March, when more than 3.5 million sexual preferences, fetishes and secrets were exposed due to the hacking of the dating site Adult FriendFinder.com - which claims to have 64 million members.
According to CNN's Money, it does not cost anything to sign up on the Ashley Madison website, but if you decide that the cheating side of town is not where you want to be anymore, it will cost you $20 to have your electronic footprints smoothed over. Brilliant! "(The delete feature) netted (Ashley Madison's parent company) $1.7 million in revenue in 2014," the website reported.
While it may come across as cynical, you have to admit it makes sense to suggest that the cybersecurity industry is behind these AshleyMadison.com and AdultFriendFinder.com attacks after asking itself, "What do we have to do to convince corporate America to protect its data?" This latest intrusion into our electronic bedrooms may be just what it takes to get more corporations to take cybersecurity seriously. It's one thing to have to deal with your credit card information being stolen when Target was hit last year, but even the most successful CEO would have a hard time explaining why he or she was looking for love in all the wrong places.
Two trends will emerge from these latest developments. One - either people will become more judicious about what they post once they realize there are no secrets on the Internet or society just won't care anymore about what gets posted. Just look at how many so-called celebrities found their fame and fortune simply by releasing a video recording of their sexual exploits?
The other trend: Corporate management is going to come around to understanding that its electronic data warrants just as much around-the-clock and constantly upgraded protection as physical inventory. Once that happens, cybersecurity companies will be as ubiquitous as their security guard cousins and Long Island, with all its software brainpower, could become the nation's epicenter for such services.
In other words, to paraphrase a line from another famous writer (Mark Twain), "There's money in them thar lies!"
Published: Thu, Aug 06, 2015
