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Ohhh, man. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the inbox. We\u2019ve known for awhile now that spam is getting more targeted<\/a>, more devious<\/a>, and much more dangerous<\/a>. The attacks are getting fast and furious<\/a>, too, even the scorched earth campaigns, which are getting past the anti-spam filters<\/a>. And while most of us deal with it the only way possible \u2013 one spam attack at a time \u2013 a new threat is looming and it might just be the one that nips you in the wallet.<\/p>\nKnown as \u2018influence manipulation\u2019 and dubbed \u2018black hat data science\u2019 by data scientist Joseph Turian, black hat spam, according to an article at CNNMoney entitled \u201cCan evil data scientists fool us all with the world\u2019s best spam?\u201d<\/a> is \u201ca new generation of spam that does away with brute force email barrages in favor of fake online personas so real that people \u2014 and, more importantly, email and web-service spam filters \u2014 can\u2019t tell they\u2019re fake.\u201d And the implications are far-reaching. \u201cDone right, these fake identities could influence everything from app downloads to e-commerce to elections.\u201d<\/p>\n At the O\u2019Reilly Strata Conference in late February, Turian gave a presentation where he stated that \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty serious issue and it\u2019s also pretty hard to catch.\u201d Black hat data science, the article points out, is really just white hat data science that\u2019s been turned on its head so it can be used for evil purposes. \u201c\u00a0So, whereas as white-hat data scientists try to uncover unnatural networks of links created to game Google\u2019s PageRank algorithm, Turian explained, black hats will try to build artificial networks so good they look real.\u201d And it\u2019s got very real legs in the future of spamming. \u201cIf someone wants to send lots and lots of undetectable spam, it\u2019s just a matter of analyzing enough language to create messages that look less like a machine wrote them and more like a stupid human wrote them \u2014 because most spam filters try not to penalize users who just don\u2019t write well.\u201d<\/p>\n This post<\/a> over at Google illustrates some of the frustrations that users face at the hands of black hat. And the CNNMoney article points out that there are companies enlisting similar technologies that Turian calls \u201c\u2019gray hat\u2019 certain well-known companies that play fast and loose with user data.\u201d It all comes down to influence manipulation, and companies don\u2019t much care who or what the source of tweets was as long as it\u2019s positive and the company\u2019s name is mentioned frequently.<\/p>\n The idea of fake personas that can convincingly charm people into believing they\u2019re real is a trend which is only going to get worse. According to Lutz Finger, co-founder of FishEye Analytics<\/a>, a media monitoring and consultation firm, \u201c7 percent of people\u2019s twitter followers are actually spambots; 30 percent of social media users are deceived by spambots and chatbots; and 20 percent of social media users accept friend requests from unknown people, 51 percent of which are not human.\u201d Indeed, a poignant article at O\u2019Reilly Strata shows how we are surrounded by bots<\/a>.<\/p>\n Discerning and validating identities may become big consulting business in the near future. Think of it as the trend that became popular with online dating: identity reports became commonplace, as did Googling people. The only problem now is that Googling may convince you that a fake person is actually real.<\/p>\n