Demand for British Passports Surge on Dark Web Post Brexit
October 17, 2016
A Freedom of Information Act request submitted by British general insurer Esure reveals that 270,000 British passports have been reported missing so far in 2016. A tiny percentage of these passports are for sale on Dark Web for a premium.
In an article by Jennifer Baker titled Dark Web awash with pricey British passports after UK vote for Brexitstates:
The value of a fake British passport has increased by six percent since the vote in favor of Brexit, and is predicted to rise further if rules on European Union freedom of movement change
Each passport is being sold for around $3,360 and upwards in Bitcoin or its equivalent. Restriction of movement across borders from the European Union to the United Kingdom is considered to be the primary reason for the surge in demand for British passports.
While the asking price for smaller EU nation passports remains tepid on Dark Web, experts are warning that instances of British passport thefts will increase by 20 percent next year.
The offline and online black market for British passports is estimated to be around $57 million a year. According to Ms Baker:
The most common hotspots for passport theft included bars and restaurants (14 percent), the beach (14 percent), busy streets (14 percent) and hotel rooms (13 percent). However, it isn’t just overseas as one in five (19 percent) of people reported a passport being stolen from their own homes.
A stolen passport can be used without any hassles till it is reported lost or stolen, and Brexit rules come into force. Even after being reported, the passport can still be used for identity theft and other online scams. Can there be a better way to curb this practice of identity theft, Brexit or not?
Vishal Ingole, October 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Equivalent of a Brexit
August 31, 2016
Britain’s historical vote to leave the European Union has set a historical precedent. What is the precedent however? Is it the choice to leave an organization? The choice to maintain their independence? Or is it a basic example of the right to choose? The Brexit will be used as a metaphor for any major upheaval for the next century, so how can it be used in technology context? BA Insight gives us the answer with “Would Your Users Vote ‘Yes’ For Sharexit?”
SharePoint is Microsoft Office’s collaborative content management program. It can be used to organize projects, build Web sites, store files, and allow team members to communicate. Office workers also spurn it across the globe over due to its inefficiencies. To avoid a Sharexit in your organization, the article offers several ways to improve a user’s SharePoint experience. One of the easiest ways to keep SharePoint is to build an individual user interface that handles little tasks to make a user’s life easier. Personalizing the individual SharePoint user experience is another method, so the end user does not feel like another cog in the system but rather that SharePoint was designed for them. Two other suggestions are plain, simple advice: take user feedback and actually use it and make SharePoint the go information center for the organization by putting everything on it.
Perhaps the best advice is making information easy to find on SharePoint:
Documents are over here, discussions over there, people are that way, and then I don’t know who the experts really are. You can make your Intranet a whole lot smarter, or dare we say “intelligent”, if you take advantage of this information in an integrated fashion, exposing your users to connected, but different, information. You can connect documents to the person who wrote them, then to that person’s expertise and connected colleagues, enabling search for your hidden experts. The ones that can really be helpful often reduce chances for misinformation, repetition of work, or errors. To do this, expertise location capabilities can combine contributed expertise with stated expertise, allowing for easy searching and expert identification.
Developers love SharePoint because it is easy to manage and to roll out information or software to every user. End users hate it because it creates more problems than resolving anything. If developers take the time to listen to what the end users need from their SharePoint experience than can avoid an Sharexit.
Whitney Grace, August 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
