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A top security experts has warned defence employees that listing their work on employment sites such as LinkedIn 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 Security of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), said it has seen nation states use, ‘even more sophisticated and difficult to detect methods’ in their attempts to unlawfully obtain sensitive information.
Whilst this may seem like common sense, ASIO has identified over 100 individuals using job sites such as LinkedIn to talk about projects they worked on, and some posting specifications and functionality on ‘open discussion forums’.
The true cost
This has direct consequences for national security, and the mistakes add up. A report quoted by Burgees identifies an overall cost of over AU$12 billion dollars in just one year lost to espionage – highlighting its impact.
These are conservative estimates too, Burgees points out, and the, ‘most serious, significant and cascading costs of espionage are not included in the 12.5 billion dollar figure’.
That means that anything without a direct calculable financial impact, like potential loss of ‘ strategic advantage, sovereign decision-making and warfighting capacity’, all of which hold ‘immense value’ are not included in the calculation.
Of course, foreign adversaries have always targeted anyone who holds valuable information of almost all kinds, and have used much more unconventional methods in the past.
That being said, social media sites in which colleagues follow and interact with each other whilst openly talking about their current professional projects does provide spooks with a cheat-sheet of target information.
These can have serious consequences for governments and companies, Burgees warned, noted how, “ust last year, an Australian tech company went into voluntary administration after one of its investors made a series of decisions that made no commercial sense. These included selling the company’s intellectual property – which had commercial and military applications – to a foreign corporation, on terms highly unfavourable to the Australian company.”
“ASIO is yet to confirm if a nation state or foreign intelligence service directed this activity, but we are aware of similar cases where sensitive information about a company’s vulnerabilities – such as its cyber security settings – were passed to hostile intelligence services by an insider.”
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