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“Data is really valuable, but for the same reason that it’s valuable in the legitimate economy, it’s also valuable for criminals. We have seen a spike in the number of web scraping incidents, with LinkedIn being the most recent example: last month, 700 million LinkedIn members personal details were posted for sale, putting 92% of its userbase at risk of social engineering and spear phishing attacks.

“This isn’t data that is gathered as a result of a breach: rather, it gathered by scraping public information. However, for anyone whose data might be used to frame phishing attacks, the details of how their personal data has been collected is likely to be of secondary importance. We all need to pay close attention to how much of our information is available via social networks: if we wouldn’t want to see the information published in the pages of a national newspaper, we shouldn’t share it online.”