Posts Tagged ‘reputation loss’

In a piece I wrote for The HuffingtonPost for 2012, I forecasted that reputation blackmail would show its hand this year. Lo and behold, a front page article in yesterday’s paper headlined “Hackers-For-Hire Are Easy to Find.”  The article had to do with two feuding brothers from Kuwaiti who were suing one another over business they held. One of the billionaire brothers found someone to hack into his brother’s account and post online all his brother’s personal emails including finances, legal affairs, pharmacy bills and everything else that you can imagine gets sent and received from one’s personal account. The cost: $400. Hackers to hire are that cheap and apparently easy to find. One of the reasons there has not been much on this topic where reputations can be easily lost is that people do not want to report this type of reputation blackmail and generate even more attention.

In this instance, the one brother hired Invisible Hacking Group located in China and here is how it works:

“It requested the target person’s email address, the names of friends or colleagues, and examples of topics that interest them. The hackers would then send an email to the target that sounded as if it came from an acquaintance, but which actually installed malicious software on the target’s computer. The software would let the hackers capture the target’s email password.”

You get the picture.

Reputation blackmail presents a very scary scenario. Not only is privacy damaged but reputations which take a long time to rebuild get decimated.  Reputation protection can only go so far. Risk management and reputation warfare gets more complicated by the day.

There has been a fair amount of news this year about people who risk everything and ultimately lose their whole reputation.  Why would anyone take that risk?  An article on “What makes a rogue trader?” made me think about people who take risks without realizing that they have so much to lose.  Also the news today about Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich being sentenced to 14 years in jail for corruption made me wonder what drove him to this pitiful situation. Money? Power? Just because he could do it. Interestingly, the article posits one theory….”What matters most of all is not how much a gamble alters their wealth, but where they start –whether they are already satisfied, or have suffered loss. Their overriding trait is their inability to accept loss.” Thus, these people are compelled to do whatever they have to in the name of gaining more wealth or achieving political office to avoid loss of their stature or status or sense that they are okay human beings. The loss seems to always outweigh what they sought in the first place. And these risk-takers lose all remnants of reputation and respect in the end. Something that you can’t even put a price on. Makes you think about Bernie Madoff. What was he thinking? His reputation is in shreds, at best.