An Cosantóir

strategic review | 21 gious beliefs, political affiliations, and photographs can often be accessed without even being 'friends', depend- ing on which privacy settings are selected. Governments, particularly those in authoritarian their IT security response department within minutes … and this for a company with a turnover in excess of £10billion. Given all the above it should be obvious to all serving accessible to anyone registered with the site, it is often possible to find out where they studied, their rank, past operations, recommendations, photos and information about colleagues. Apparently harmless 'tweets' could also provide record than most social media websites, you will find groups for just about anything. One such example is a group called Royal Marines Network which, in seconds, provides information on 1,300 serving and ex-serving Royal Marine Commandos to anyone who has access to the network. Also from an individual's LinkedIn profile, which is states with access to large amounts of manpower, are likely to have entire divisions dedicated to intelligence gathering. In the recent past large-scale hacking at- tempts have been traced back to one city that also hap- pens to have a large defence academy. It is highly likely that these states have teams sifting through search engines and social media, hunting for details on names and ranks of military personnel, their training and background, and past and present operations of other states' armed forces. On LinkedIn, which has a better privacy and security military personnel that they need to think long and hard before posting anything on any internet site about their job as even the most insignificant detail could provide infor- mation that could be exploited. For instance, information posted about recently acquired IT equipment could well be enough for a remote hacker to exploit vulnerabilities in the system to gain access to sensitive information. Military personnel must be aware that information on individu- als, unit deployments, and operations are kept secret for a reason and that they should do nothing that could compro- mise this security and potentially put themselves or their colleagues at risk. keen eyes with valuable information. "Weather here a balmy 43°C, not great for flak jackets!" Without mentioning an exact location a quick search of some likely locations on worldwide weather websites could quickly narrow it down. All of this could be of use to a foreign intelligence agency in gathering statistics of personnel numbers and what units are stationed at home or, for example, at an outpost in Afghanistan. Intelligence agencies are not the only worry. In the past, domestic and foreign terrorist cell networks have been found to be plotting to kidnap soldiers or poison military bases in Western states. Such terrorists could easily create a list of targets and then research the individuals to find out where they live through everyday websites such as online telephone directories. This author once tried to report a data leakage to a multinational company but their switchboard was not very accommodating. So instead I went on to LinkedIn, ran a few advanced searches, and had the entire list of Note on the author: Graeme Batsman is the CEO of Data Defender Ltd, a UK company that specialises in data protection, primarily through data encryption and the installation of self-destruct systems for data identified to be at risk. www.military.ie THE DEFENCE FORCES MAGAZINE

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