Attacking Soldiers on Social Media
A research group at NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence catfished soldiers involved in an European military exercise—we don’t know what country they were from—to demonstrate the power of the attack technique.
Over four weeks, the researchers developed fake pages and closed groups on Facebook that looked like they were associated with the military exercise, as well as profiles impersonating service members both real and imagined.
To recruit soldiers to the pages, they used targeted Facebook advertising. Those pages then promoted the closed groups the researchers had created. Inside the groups, the researchers used their phony accounts to ask the real service members questions about their battalions and their work. They also used these accounts to “friend” service members. According to the report, Facebook’s Suggested Friends feature proved helpful in surfacing additional targets.
The researchers also tracked down service members’ Instagram and Twitter accounts and searched for other information available online, some of which a bad actor might be able to exploit. “We managed to find quite a lot of data on individual people, which would include sensitive information,” Biteniece says. “Like a serviceman having a wife and also being on dating apps.”
By the end of the exercise, the researchers identified 150 soldiers, found the locations of several battalions, tracked troop movements, and compelled service members to engage in “undesirable behavior,” including leaving their positions against orders.
“Every person has a button. For somebody there’s a financial issue, for somebody it’s a very appealing date, for somebody it’s a family thing,” Sarts says. “It’s varied, but everybody has a button. The point is, what’s openly available online is sufficient to know what that is.”
This is the future of warfare. It’s one of the reasons China stole all of that data from the Office of Personal Management. If indeed a country’s intelligence service was behind the Equifax attack, this is why they did it.
Go back and read this scenario from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Why wouldn’t a country intent on starting a war do it that way?
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(required) • February 26, 2019 6:53 AM
Some years back I stumbled upon a Facebook group for “operators” (I’d originally been looking for 911 operators but hey, mercenaries are interesting too).
Pretty friendly group – lots of posts RE: contracts, many of them had photo galleries on location or w/clients (faces blurred but easily enough information to figure out the where, when, and probably who of the assignment) – got a Kevlar vest shipped overseas for cheap out of the deal.
Friendly soldiers on social media: not so good for operational security.