Villari was started because a founder’s mother in law got scammed. And as the Villari team started speaking with people, we realized that nearly everyone we spoke to had a friend or loved one who’d been scammed. It’s an eight billion dollar problem that we are laser-focused on fixing. 

And yet. 

I need you to think about that paragraph. And the words I chose. And how they make you feel. 

Connotations

A connotation is the cultural context of a word, or its implication. If I say “old” in English, there are a bunch of connotations in English about that, most of them really negative. The connotations in, say, Italian or Chinese, from a culture that venerates their elderly, are completely different. The literal meaning of the word hasn’t changed, but the way we feel it absolutely does. 

Communication that makes you feel strongly does so through the connotation. So if I say, “they were scammed,” there is a whole lot of connotative value you might not even realize you’re thinking. For instance, the action is being done to the subject of the sentence. It implies passivity, and in our culture, that’s not a good thing. Acting is good, being acted upon implies weakness, passivity, domination.

The person who was scammed, historically, isn’t thought well of. Per Wikipedia, “The intended victims are known as marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls (from the word gullible).” There’s a whole lot of condescension there. Which is how victims are shamed away from loudly denouncing the crime that happened. 

Reframe it closer to the truth

Let’s try this another way. I’m going to reframe the opening paragraph of this blog.

Villari was started because a founder’s mother in law was robbed. And as the Villari team started speaking with people, we realized that nearly everyone we spoke to had a friend or loved one who’d been robbed. It’s an eight billion dollar criminal problem that we are laser-focused on fixing. 

That one hits different, right? Being robbed is a scarier thing. It conjures up images of big men in ski masks with guns, violently taking something of value away from you. It sounds like the mother of all crime waves. It sounds like something you’d take up with your local law enforcement. 

The way we speak about the ways in which criminals steal from people changes the narrative, and with it, changes the seriousness with which we treat this problem. 

Human-centered cybersecurity is the path of the future.

Here’s another example: pig butchering. According to Wikipedia, 

Pig-butchering scams originated in 2016 or earlier as a regional scam in China, originally finding their victims on same-sex dating sites before expanding to opposite-sex dating sites as well. The term “pig butchering” arises from an analogy comparing the initial phase of gaining the victims’ trust to the fattening of pigs before slaughtering them.

Holy power-differential, Batman! These victims aren’t even human anymore, so why should we empathize with them? Linguistically, it’s masterful; people who fall for this are no better than pigs. We associate them with pigs. But behind that linguistic judo, there’s a whole human being who was cleverly targeted, brutally set up, and then criminally robbed. 

Taxonomy

We spend a lot of time thinking about how we speak about the world of cybercrime and security. Language informs thought, and so choice of word impacts how we think about a problem, how we approach its solution, and how we treat the humans involved in that crisis. 

Our industry relies on taxonomy, or the ordering of information, in order to do our work. The different scams all have different names, so that we have a way of organizing defenses against clusters of attacks with similar components. Within the field, these designations are neologisms, and they get adopted into the language really fast: at the speed at which technology moves. No one’s editing them or auditing them, as is customary with other words entering the lexicon. So while we use them in the work, it’s important to remind ourselves that every single attack we identify also represents a human being with hopes and dreams and logistics and needs, whose life was derailed by this event we’re analyzing.

Center the human 

We feel that the cybersecurity industry trend of moving away from the Mr. Robot aesthetic, and over into fully human-centered cybersecurity, is the path of the future. And so, we will continue to be strongly in favor of language that centers the human, and decenters all connotations that disempower the victims of these crimes. It’s time we take this way more seriously than we have to date.