‘CYBER-TECH’ MOVEMENT
DISCLAIMER
The following research has been appropriately collated and sourced, with references provided throughout, while general opinions are considered ownership of the author.
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I first heard about the phrase ‘cyber-tech movement’ in the ‘future of fashion’ social news XYZ digital magazine in March 2024. Since then, I have been on a journey to identify examples of this new phenomenon.
The term ‘cyber’ was first coined in the 1940’s as a way to describe communicating between people and hardware. Cyber to industry experts such as myself means digitally enabled and is often associated with types of compromise taking place online causing reputational and financial impacts to businesses, and brands.
It isn’t a secret that technology has enhanced our world, and how we interact with each other daily, providing ease of conversation through smartphones, and quick purchasing power within ecommerce stores. All this together means fashion can be explored between people and computers, enhanced by technology to grow interactions. As technology evolves, so do consumers.
Although ‘cyber’ has been around for almost a decade, ‘cyber security’ came later at the turn of the 1990’s, referring to safeguarding, and implementing protections against thieves in cyberspace. Over the last years, cyber crime has flourished, against the backdrop of rising technology influencing malware creation, generative AI for enhanced phishing, deepfake technology, and big data processes.
For example, the Ducktail malware targeted fashion in November 2023, with threat actors distributing archives containing image of new products by major clothing companies to professionals, embedded with a malicious executable disguised as a PDF file. Once this is opened, its contents are revealed as job information / career change data. However, the attached malware installs a browser extension onto the victim’s machine to identify and steal credentials, later sold on the dark web (a decentralised area of the internet accessible for the purpose of illegal activity).
More recently in February 2024, the first AI deepfake scam was reported to have targeted a finance worker, setting up a fake conference call pretending to be colleagues, even going as far as to impersonate the victim’s chief financial officer, obtaining £25M. Although this was not impacting retail or fashion, various industries use communication platforms such as Teams and Zoom to conduct meetings with colleagues, and therefore this threat could play out in real-world scenarios cross-industry.
