There are red faces at NATO this morning after it emerged that a social engineering attack, reportedly originating from China, was able to harvest the details of those who accepted friend requests from a fake account purporting to be American Admiral James Stavridis.
The attack is unlikely to have uncovered any sensitive information, but was able to uncover many details of colleagues of Adrmial Stavridis, who was recently in charge of operations in Libya.
It is not known how much information was harvested, but it is believed to include names, email addresses, current locations, pictures of friends and family, clues about home addresses as well as the insights gained about personalities from wall posts. The fear is that the information could be used to compile detailed profiles for targets or for blackmail.
Facebook, which is reportedly able to identify fake accounts as they have different activity patterns, has taken the account down since it was discovered last year. NATO has responded by encouraging its staff to open their own social networking profiles.
This latest incident is likely to strengthen the US’ opinion that China is among the “most aggressive collectors” of US economic and technology secrets. In February last year, security firm McAfee claimed that China was responsible for a cyber-attack that took control of the internal servers of energy companies and used tactics such as social engineering.
The attack is also unlikely to increase confidence in Facebook’s security measures. Researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada were able to build a socialbot network that collected 250GB of personal data from Facebook users, including 46,500 email address and 14,500 home addresses during an eight week period.
However the social network disputed the researchers’ criticisms of its security, arguing that they used unfair and unethical methods during their experiment, such as using academic email addresses. Facebook has even been told itself that it must stop the way that it gathers information about its users for advertising purposes following an intervention from the European Commission.
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I am amazed to read about your security concerns about China.
When are you going to realise that china is not your friend. and never will be.
and yet you let them into your universities to learn all your latest information, which they will then use against you.
Learn a big lesson, kick them out of your Country.