Raising Risk Awareness on the Adoption of Web 2.0 Technologies in Decision Making Processes

Abstract: In the recent past, the so-called “Web 2.0” became a powerful tool for decision making processes. Politicians and managers, seeking to improve participation, embraced this technology as if it simply were a new, enhanced version of theWorldWideWeb, better suited to retrieve information, opinions and feedbacks from the general public on subjects like laws, acts and policies. This approach was often naive, neglecting the less-obvious aspects of the technology, and thus bringing on significant security problems. This paper shows how, in the end, the result could easily be the opposite of what was desired. Malicious attackers, in fact, could quite easily exploit the vulnerabilities in these systems to hijack the process and lead to wrong decisions, also causing the public to lose trust in the systems themselves.