The IADAS is concerned that hackers may harvest personal data to sell or steal in identity theft scams as more people use their cellphones for social media and clouds to store personal information.

On the contrary, they were designed to be unobtrusive, to slip into the background, the better to secretly harvest data.

At their best, these programs are simple, harvesting data from an electronic checkbook to give you an accurate thumbnail appraisal of saving and spending habits that will put you on track for that beach house.

STEVE: "...before it started harvesting and sending data to a remote server.

Always give slightly different information about yourself, facebook twitter whatever, so that when government trolls are doing what trolls do, they are harvesting false data, flood them with false data.

Which if course indicates "the weakness is already being exploited in the wild to harvest data many users believe is not available for general consumption."

It is much easier to collect online prices than offline prices, and with a little bit of ingenuity, you can even harvest data about costs and sales volume, information that is awfully hard to come by in the real world.

QuBit's initial focus is ecommerce, harvesting retail data for companies, including AOL, BlackBerry and TalkTalk, to identify how much time consumers spent on a site, where they entered and left it, and what triggered a purchase decision.

The game will harvest data about the players in order to create content.

The malware appears to be targeting users in Brazil, harvesting and collecting specific data, including the infected computers' host names and operating system types.