THE POISON IS NOT IN A DART. IT'S IN THE AC DUCT.
DataQuest|October 2023
Data Poisoning, the sly and silent monster, is already around. If we are not worried already by the glimpse that some incidents have provided us; let's steal a peek at the sheer power of data poisoning. Looks like - it can ruin companies, public systems, countries and human lives - with the push of button.
Pratima H
THE POISON IS NOT IN A DART. IT'S IN THE AC DUCT.

Imagine you enter your office and see signs of a failed robbery. Till yesterday, you could let out a sigh of relief. But today, if there are signs of a break-in but the gold in the locker is sitting peacefully, it’s a bigger alarm to pay attention to. A botched burglary is a horror-movie in the making.

Because chances are that the burglar had sneaked in with a different purpose. There could be poison mixed in that water-cooler or the pudding in the fridge. Alas, while a household can quickly empty the refrigerator, companies and government bodies cannot throw away all their data that easily. It’s tricky. And yet, a ticking bomb.

A threat that’s not sitting far away. A big train accident out of nowhere. A dangerous brake-failure in all cars of a new model’s batch. A fatal drug that is rolled out without the company’s knowledge and is suddenly sitting on many counters. A mess-up with the stock market that crashes the financial pulse of an entire nation. A DDoS attack that causes a huge outage and the dominoes fall everywhere – whoever uses that Cloud.

Cyanide or Cool-Aid. It’s hard to tell anymore when we look at a bottle of data. Data poisoning is the next big threat vector coming upon us. And it’s neither an accident, nor a small bug. To twist the knife further- it’s gonna get very easy and cheap for the bad guys. And very tough and all-high-stakes for the good guys.

SNAKES DRESSED AS SNAILS

This story is from the October 2023 edition of DataQuest.

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This story is from the October 2023 edition of DataQuest.

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