- Experts warned that they may not list all their online experience
- So could open them to attacks and scams
- LinkedIn could be a good place to announce, but it has some limits
A main security expert warned defense employees who list their work in employment sites such as LinkedIn has created a “cumulative and integral set of information, people and opportunities for foreign powers to point and exploit.”
Mike Burgees, General Security Director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), said he has seen the national states use, “even more sophisticated and difficult to detect methods” in his attempts to obtain confidential information.
While this may seem common sense, ASIO has identified more than 100 people who use work sites such as LinkedIn to talk about projects in which they worked and some specifications of publication and functionality in ‘Open Discussion Forums’.
The real cost
This has direct consequences for national security, and errors are added. A report cited by Burgees identifies a total cost of more than $ 12 billion in just one year lost for espionage, highlighting its impact.
These are conservative estimates too, Burgees points out and the “most serious, significant and cascade of espionage are not included in the figure of 12.5 billion dollars.”
That means that anything without a direct calculable financial impact, such as the potential loss of “strategic advantage, sovereign decision making and war capacity”, all of which has an “immense value” are not included in the calculation.
Of course, foreign adversaries have always addressed anyone who has valuable information of almost all kinds, and has used much more conventional methods in the past.
That said, social media sites in which colleagues continue and interact with each other while they openly talk about their current professional projects provides ghosts a target information trap sheet.
These may have serious consequences for governments and companies, Burgees warned, he pointed out how “last year, an Australian technology company entered voluntary administration after one of its investors made a series of decisions that did not make commercial sense. These included selling the company’s intellectual property, which had commercial and military applications, to a foreign corporation, in highly unfavorable terms for the Australian company.”
“Asio has not yet confirmed whether an intelligence service of the State of the Nation or foreign intelligence directed this activity, but we are aware of similar cases in which confidential information about the vulnerabilities of a company, such as its cyber security configurations, was transmitted to hostile intelligence services by a privileged person.”
