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Chinese Compiling "Facebook" of US Government Employees
schwit1 writes: According to private security firm CrowdStrike's founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, the Chinese are compiling a massive 'Facebook' like database on American federal government employees for use in espionage and blackmail. The data was stolen from high profile attacks against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, as well as intrusions into the Anthem and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield health insurance networks. "That can now be used to embarrass you publicly and force you to work for the Chinese government," Alperovitch says. "It's, in effect, a private version of Facebook with much more detail about your life than even Facebook has that the Chinese now have access to."
As opposed to a regular database...
Why don't they just use actual Facebook for this? Lots of people have been publicly shamed through Facebook, to the point of losing their careers, their marriages, or even committing suicide.
They're using the pre-2004, non-proper-noun sense of "facebook".
I'm already embarrassed working for the US government.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'm surprised how this is actually news, every government keeps dossiers on foreign government officials in a database. There have been reports of nefarious web crawling data collecting networks for years, many tracked back to government owned networks. Do you think the personal data the FBI gets from prosecuting hackers is actually thrown away, no they add it to their database.
Just because the government knows you cheated on your wife (because it came up in your background clearance check) does not mean that your wife knows. This is leverage.
Truth is that up-to-date, accurate and detailed, organizational structure of army or other organization that participates in national defense is a prized reference tool useful both in peace and in a war time. Many of the organizations take extra precautions to distort, obfuscate real org chart and to hide key areas, such as communications/network, nuclear etc.
If enough time and efforts are invested all the org charts can be recreated, however in reality, due to the resource limitations only generals and top-lieutenants are in a typical org tree. Chinese made their own life easier since they have now a significant details and granularity of the information. Be sure that selected individuals will be targeted for intelligence and recruitment operations.
In Naruto, they call it a Bingo Book.
...Facebook compiles you!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!