The personal information of active-duty military personnel has been found for sale online, making service members potential targets for blackmail according to a new report from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.
Researchers found they could shop around for data on military service members based on their location, such as if they lived or worked near Fort Bragg and other high-profile military sites, and some of these records were available for as little as $0.12.
“It’s really a case of being able to target people based on specific vulnerabilities,” Maj. Jessica Dawson, an assistant professor at West Point and a research scientist at the academy’s Army Cyber Institute, told Politico.
“It was way too easy to obtain this data: a simple domain, 12 cents a service member, and no background checks on our purchases,” Justin Sherman, who heads the data brokerage research project at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, told CNN.
“If our research team, subject to university research ethics and privacy processes, could do this in an academic study, a foreign adversary could get data in a heartbeat to profile, blackmail, or target military personnel,” he added.
The researchers note that while the personal data of service members is subject to the same rules as that of other American citizens, the nature of the military’s code of conduct makes active-duty military members vulnerable to extortion.
“Cheating on your spouse, financial issues, mental health concerns, all of those things can get your security clearances revoked. Those things are all in the data. It just takes the right combination of content and attackers to start trying to exploit that information,” Dawson said.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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