Terrorists active in social media, says paper

Terrorist groups use online social network sites to monitor military personnel and recruit new followers, says a new paper by a University of Haifa communications professor.

Gabriel Weimann, in a paper submitted to the Israeli Communication Association, says terrorists gain access to soldiers' profiles by sending connection requests from fake profiles. "Many users don't even bother finding out who they are confirming as 'Friend' and to whom they are providing access to a large amount of information on their personal life," Weimann says in a university press release.

Indeed, in 2010, a security researcher named Thomas Ryan was able to get hundreds of connections, including from within the intelligence community, over the course of a month by using the fake profile of a supposed 20-something woman named "Robin Sage." Ryan, who unveiled his findings at Black Hat USA 2010, said he was able to see the geographical locations of troops Sage friended and received job offers from major defense contracting firms, including Lockheed Martin, according to Dark Reading.

Weimann notes that U.S., Canadian and British militaries or intelligence services have warned troops to limit the information they post onto social networks. "Even if the information does not give details about the logistics of troop movements, it could potentially endanger the friends and relatives of the military and security personnel," Weimann writes.

Canadian troops, he adds, have even been asked to exclude any information from social media profiles that could link them in any way with the military.

As for recruitment, Weimann says terrorists create targeted fake profiles suited to the particular social group they want to target.

"In the same way that marketing groups can view a member's information to decide which products to target to your webpage, terrorist groups can view people's profiles to decide whom they are going to target and how they should configure the message," he writes.

Analysis by the Rand Corp., however, says that online terrorist recruiting is in fact not very effective; Weimann doesn't address in the paper the extent to which online terrorist monitoring or recruitment is effective for such organizations.

For more:
- go to the University of Haifa's press release on Weimann's paper

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