Foreign entities looking for information on advanced U.S. military technology are increasingly asking defense contractors for information through emailed requests, phone calls or marketing surveys.

A report released March 31 by the Defense Security Service, which oversees military contractor information safeguards, found that entities in over half of all countries worldwide tried at least once during fiscal 2008 to illicitly acquire U.S. defense technology or information.

The top collectors of information were companies, not governments, although company involvement often merely masks state-sponsored interest, the report states.

The most common method was simply to ask for information through emailed requests. "Suspicious Internet activity" was the second method, but it has "growing significance," the report states. The report classifies spear-phishing as a suspicious Internet activity.

The "abundance of personnel and technical information contained within [clear defense contractor] websites, as well as the growing use of social networking sites" could give cyber actors an edge in extracting information, the report warns.

Of highest interest during fiscal 2008 was information about unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States accounts for approximately 70 percent of the worldwide UAV research and development test and evaluation spending, the report notes.

An analyst's comment in the report traces foreign interest in UAVs to countries "attempting to address existing internal or border conflicts that taxed their limited command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities."

The report's data comes from analysis of suspicious contacts reports filed by defense contractors. More than 32 percent of those reports reflected a potential counterintelligence threat, the report states. Countries in East Asia and the Pacific generated the most suspicious reports.

For more:
- read the report (.pdf)
- see this Nextgov article

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