- Experts warned of perhaps not to indicate all their experience online
- This could open them for attacks and scams
- LinkedIn is perhaps a great place to advertise yourself – but have some limits
A top security expert has warned defense staff that it has created a ‘cumulative and comprehensive set of information, people and opportunities for foreign powers to target and exploit.’
Mike Burgees, the Director -General of the Security of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (Asio), said it has seen nation states use, ‘even more sophisticated and difficult to detect methods’ in their attempts to illegally obtain sensitive information.
While this may seem like common sense, Asio has identified over 100 people using job sites such as LinkedIn to talk about projects they were working on, and some publication specifications and functionality on ‘Open Discussion Forums’.
The true costs
This has direct consequences for national security and the errors are added. A report cited by Burgees identifies a total cost of over $ 12 billion in just one year lost to espionage – and highlights its influence.
These are also conservative estimates, Burgees points out, and the ‘most serious, significant and cascading costs of espionage are not included in the number of $ 12.5 billion’.
This means that everything without a directly calculated financial impact, such as potential loss of ‘strategic advantage, sovereign decision making and war capacity’, all of which have ‘enormous value’, is not included in the calculation.
Of course, foreign opponents have always targeted anyone who has valuable information of almost all kinds, and has used much more unconventional methods in the past.
That said, social media pages where colleagues follow and interact with each other, while openly talking about their current professional projects, spooks with a cheatsheet with target information.
These can have serious consequences for governments and businesses, warned Burgees, and noticed how “Ust last year, an Australian tech company, went into volunteer administration after one of his investors made a number of decisions that gave no commercial sense. These included selling the company’s intellectual property – which had commercial and military applications – to a foreign company, on conditions that were very unfortunate to the Australian property. company. “
“Asio should not yet confirm whether a nation -state or foreign intelligence service corrected this activity, but we are aware of similar cases where sensitive information about a company’s vulnerabilities – such as its cyber security settings – was transferred to hostile intelligence services by an insider.”
