International espionage used to mean secret meetings in dark alleys, code breaking and, most importantly, fake mustaches. Nowadays, however, everybody’s a hacker. Spies can get all the dirt they need sitting on a couch, tapping away on a laptop. Impervia will release a new report tomorrow showing how cyber spies will target friends and family of government workers’ Facebook pages to try and piece together passwords and other confidential information. NextGov looked at an early draft of the report, which shows how “hackers can analyze these records, including connections between ‘friended’ business partners and colleagues, to map out the hierarchy of different organizations. ‘The organizational structure can be used for corporate espionage, foreign-government and even military intelligence.’”
It’s all about privacy settings, but those can be hard to control when you’re not dealing with just your account. You see if I download an app and give it permission to see stats from my friends and one of those friends works for the CIA and posts pictures with time stamps and geolocation, well then we’re all doomed. Actually, it does seem like a lot of work for very little payoff, but I guess you only need to crack one code one time to become the next superpower. Have a good day!
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
