Salary survey, cloud fraud, immigration numbers and more

Salary survey paints optimistic picture for analytics professionals

Harnham, a global leader in data and analytics recruitment, recently released the 2018 editions of its salary guides for the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe. The surveys are based on feedback from thousands of data and analytics professionals across the globe.

“Our surveys are created for analysts, by analysts and offer a detailed, on-the-ground look at what’s concerning talent in the industry,” says Harnham COO Dave Farmer. “The data industry continues to grow and shows no sign of slowing, with demand for analysts still easily outstripping supply.”

All three salary surveys are available to download from www.harnham.com and include salary and trend analysis across five key specialisms: data and technology, data science, digital analytics, marketing and insight, and risk analytics.

Farmer further discusses the salary surveys and key findings in this issue’s Executive Edge column.

Yale research on immigration, aging runners grabs headlines

A recent study by Yale professor and former INFORMS President Edward H. Kaplan (photo), Yale colleague Jonathan Feinstein and Mohammad M. Fazel-Zarandi of MIT suggests that the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is nearly twice as many as experts previously thought. Since its publication last month, the study, which estimates the number of such immigrants at 22.1 million instead of 11.3 million, has garnered worldwide attention from major media outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Fox News, Bloomberg News and the Daily Mail.

The study, which provides an estimated range of undocumented immigrants between 16 million and 29 million with 22.1 million as the mean, is based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016. The authors are quick to point out, as Kaplan did in an appearance on “Fox and Friends,” that their research does not indicate that the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is suddenly exploding. To the contrary, the research shows: 1) that the greatest growth of undocumented immigrants during that timeframe occurred in the 1990s through the mid-2000s, 2) that the growth was vastly undercounted at the time, and 3) that the number has remained relatively stable over the past decade.

As the Yale School of Management’s Insights notes, the approach in the new research was based on operational data, such as deportations, visa overstays and demographic data, including death rates and immigration rates. “We combined these data using a demographic model that follows a very simple logic,” Kaplan explains. “The population today is equal to the initial population plus everyone who came in minus everyone who went out. It’s that simple.”

Kaplan adds, “The analysis we’ve done can be thought of as estimating the size of a hidden population. People who are undocumented immigrants are not walking around with labels on their foreheads. Neither are populations of homeless people, neither are populations of drug users, and neither are populations of terrorists. Yet for policy, it is very important to know the size of these hidden populations because that sets the scale of the problem in each of these different policy areas.”

Another study co-authored by Kaplan – this one co-authored with Yale economist Ray Fair and focused on running and aging – served as the basis for an Oct. 3 article (“We Slow as We Age, but May Not Need to Slow Too Much”) in the New York Times by Gretchen Reynolds.

“The new analysis, which refines famous past research by one of the scientists [Fair], finds that, although declines in running performance with age are ineluctable, they may be less steep than many of us fear,” Reynolds writes. “And, perhaps most important, the new research updates a popular formula and calculator that runners past the age of 40 can use to determine how fast we can expect to slow down and provides us with reasonable, age-appropriate finishing-time targets for ourselves.”

As part of their research, Fair and Kaplan analyzed data on world masters running records for men ages 35-95 for the 5K, 10K, half marathon and marathon events. (The data on women runners was limited and statistically suspect.)

“The complicated calculations indicate that current world records for older runners theoretically could drop by as much as 8 percent in the future, Dr. Kaplan says, providing all of us new benchmarks for our own aging performance,” the Times article concludes.

Report: One in five cloud-based user accounts may be fake

According to the Q2 2018 DataVisor Fraud Index Report, more than one in five user accounts set up through cloud service providers may be fraudulent. The report, based on information gathered between April and June, analyzes 1.1 billion active user accounts, 1.5 million email domains, 231,000 device types and 562 cloud hosting providers and data centers, among other indicators.

DataVisor, a fraud detection platform, found that 22 percent of accounts originating from cloud service IP ranges appear to be fraudulent. Malicious accounts are eight times more likely to originate via cloud services than normal users. Some cloud services and data centers can have more than 75 percent fraudulent accounts, the study found.

More than 21 percent of fake accounts targeting online and financial services originated from the United States, and 17 percent originated from China. In attacks targeting North American online services, more than 45 percent originated in the U.S. Interestingly, crime rings leverage different cloud service providers depending on the attack. Fraudsters targeting social platforms largely use Amazon Web Services; DigitalOcean appears to be preferred by fraudsters targeting mobile apps and financial services, according to the report.

Coordinated attacks – a group of fraudulent accounts controlled by the same attacker – represent the majority of fraudulent activity in both social platforms and financial services, the report found. More than 90 percent of fake account registration in social platforms involves coordinated attacks; in the financial sector more than 40 percent of application fraud comes from coordinated attacks.

While most fraudulent attacks occur less than a day after accounts are established, some “sleeper cell” accounts can lie in wait for months or years before being used. On average, fraudulent accounts incubate for 35 days before attacking.

“[This report]” demonstrates that the increased adoption of the cloud has unintended consequences for the financial well-being of online businesses,” says Yinglian Xie, CEO and co-founder of DataVisor. To read this and other DataVisor reports, click here.