Re:Pentagon Now Sees Big Data as 'National Security Threat'
by cinquemb on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:25PM
(#6206668)
"The doomsday thinkers over at DARPA are looking for researchers to "investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources." The question is, could a determined data miner use only publicly available information -- culled from Web pages and social media or from a consumer data broker -- to cause "nation-state type effects." Forget identify theft. DARPA appears to be talking about outing undercover intelligence officers; revealing military war plans; giving hackers a playbook for taking down a bank; or creating maps of sensitive government facilities.
I'll save them some time and say its possible, and if they are just inquiring into this, they are already behind the game… Using wikipedia, one can get a list most of the oil refineries in the united states (for the world for that matter), and from some api queries using either popular or open-source map/geocoding services, obtain gps coordinates within 100's of feet of those locations, within a matter of seconds.
If you scrape cryptome/other places every so often of the lists uncovered (often with contact info[numbers|emails|names|addresses]) of people, map them against other lists to find connections (this takes a matter of seconds as well), it is not unheard of that one could automate emails/calls/send mail to people to uncover attack surfaces to exploit.
And even until more recently, one could access public all posts on facebook via https://graph.facebook.com/search without authentication, and with some well crafted queries, one was able to get specific information about people that one wouldn't think would be possible to obtain.
I'll save them some time and say its possible, and if they are just inquiring into this, they are already behind the game… Using wikipedia, one can get a list most of the oil refineries in the united states (for the world for that matter), and from some api queries using either popular or open-source map/geocoding services, obtain gps coordinates within 100's of feet of those locations, within a matter of seconds.
If you scrape cryptome/other places every so often of the lists uncovered (often with contact info[numbers|emails|names|addresses]) of people, map them against other lists to find connections (this takes a matter of seconds as well), it is not unheard of that one could automate emails/calls/send mail to people to uncover attack surfaces to exploit.
And even until more recently, one could access public all posts on facebook via https://graph.facebook.com/search without authentication, and with some well crafted queries, one was able to get specific information about people that one wouldn't think would be possible to obtain.
The list goes on.