put a fresh spotlight on a problem few businesspeople think about as they tweet, "friend" and message away on the internet: Social media is crawling with spies.
Former FBI counterintelligence operative Eric O'Neill agrees. To spies, he said, "LinkedIn is interesting — you can use it to find out a lot of corporate information without even hacking." The problem, the official said, is that government officials, who are themselves looking to network and find higher paying jobs with more responsibility, put detailed accounts of their careers on the site — which can give the Chinese and others a road map of exactly whom to approach.
Between January and June, LinkedIn says it took action against 21.6 million fake accounts and that it stopped the vast majority at registration, before they ever went live on LinkedIn. The company says it restricted 2 million fake accounts before members reported them, and 67,000 afterward. LinkedIn says it did so by pairing human review with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Why go through all that trouble making fake networking contacts? Because it works. Watts said he knows of a major bank that discovered its CEO had five separate profiles on LinkedIn. But the CEO himself hadn't created any of them. Watts concluded that intelligence agents were using the fake CEO personas to connect with people the executive knew, and draw intelligence about the bank out of those real executives using direct messages from their phony boss.
No one should be on Linked In anymore.
'It is a cost of doing business to combat nation-state intelligence agencies,' he said. 'If you're a Google or a Facebook, you can't say you're hopelessly outgunned. You have the smartest people and enormous resources.' Populism using it's tools for recreating only mercantilism.
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Source: Reuters - 🏆 2. / 97 Read more »