Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Spies Used Fake Facebook Profile To Friend NATO Officials
An anonymous reader writes "Late last year, senior British military officers, Defense Ministry officials, and other government officials were tricked into becoming Facebook friends with someone masquerading as United States Navy admiral James Stavridis. By doing so, they exposed their own personal information (such as private e-mail addresses, phone numbers, pictures, the names of family members, and possibly even the details of their movements), to unknown hackers."
Who knew that if you weren't friends with someone, they couldn't see your data. Hmm. Seriously though. Senior NATO officials have Facebook pages! Dumb! Their private information is on those Facebook pages? Dumber...
Registering for Facebook with a fake name hardly qualifies as hacking.
Surprisingly, the headline is more accurate than the story.
Hey, how's it going?
A friend of mine who retired from CIA after 26 years once told me that his family was only happy for six of those years... and not six consecutive years. Cut off from family and friends back home and in contact only by letters and the occasional "home leave" of a month or two, he was trying to fit back in to the country he spent his life trying to serve (back in the days when the Agency was less of an operational force and more of an intelligence gathering organization). I can see how Facebook would have made their lives more enjoyable with all the family and friends news (and even minutia). I'm sure it's a security risk par excellance but I can certainly understand why they'd do it. And I can especially understand why a wife, stuck inside an apartment in Djibouti trying to order six months of canned food from Denmark, might.
I don't expect Slashdot readers to grok it, though.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!