Computer scientists predict that a new generation of malware will mine social networks for people’s private patterns of behavior: the pattern of links between individuals and their behavior in the network–how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on.

The idea would be to release some kind of malware that records the patterns of links in a network. This kind of malware will be very hard to detect, says Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and associates. They’ve studied the strategies that best mine behavioural pattern data from a real mobile phone network consisting of 800,000 links between 200,000 phones. (They call this type of attack “Stealing Reality”.)

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1010.1028: Stealing Reality