Screen Science

THE MODERN investigative journalist does things differently to his predecessors. If you’re trying to get info on someone, you don’t need to hide in their front garden rose bush all night hoping to catch them up to no good. These days, the best detectives are techno savvy.

In the new thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoojournalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) must investigate the disappearance of a girl 40 years ago. He is assisted by the pierced, tattooed (and pretty bonkers) computer whiz kid Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara.

Why does Blomkvist choose someone so young and inexperienced as his sidekick? Because she had already shown, through her advanced computer hacking skills, just how much she could find out about him with a little bit of technical know-how.

We’re often told about how important it is to keep your online information safe and private. But the reality is, the right person can find out almost anything they want about someone, if that information is somewhere online. “Any info you put on the web about yourself is publicly accessible to your worst enemy,” explains DIT computer programming lecturer, Damian Gordon.

You don’t even need that many computer skills. Most people have probably “googled” their name to see what comes up. The search engine explores what’s known as the surface web and is limited in terms of what info it can access about a person. To get into the deep web to find information of a more personal nature, there are other search engines, like Pipl.com, that do just that.

“If someone wants to target you, they don’t need your email or Facebook password,” says John Breslin of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). “They can usually make an intelligent guess at a security question for the account. Too often people use questions like their mother’s maiden name, which is easy information to figure out.”

Finding the right programmes to access someone’s online presence is not a problem for someone who knows what they’re doing. So the lesson is: be careful. “Imagine you’re going to be running for president of Ireland,” says Gordon. “The kind of information about you available online should be acceptable to a person running for president.”