Disruption and Deception in Crowdsourcing

While crowdsourcing has become increasingly popular among organizations, it also has become increasingly susceptible to unethical and malicious activities. This article discusses recent examples of disruptive and deceptive efforts on crowdsourcing sites, which impacted the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the crowdsourcing efforts’ service, stakeholders, and data. From these examples, the authors derive an organizing framework of risk types associated with disruption and deception in crowdsourcing based on commonalities among incidents. The framework includes prank activities, the intentional placement of false information, hacking attempts, DDoS attacks, botnet attacks, privacy violation attempts, and data breaches. Finally, the authors discuss example controls that can assist in identifying and mitigating disruption and deception risks in crowdsourcing.