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Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

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Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#111

Post by ta988 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #17

An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud. If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phon…

That's something that has always amazed me. Even visiting an embassy you are not allowed to have any kind of electronics, and in secret/confidential operations you can take your personal phone?

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#113

Post by BelenusMordred »

kindle-dev wrote: post #92
kbenson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Tiktok is technically slightly worse, focusing on that rather than the gaping real problem of publicly posting top secret info is missing the forest for the trees. Solve the problem of people posting this to social media and it won't matter if the company is US owned and operated or foreign owned and operated because neither will have anything to work with.

Responding to your other comment: the app has access to your camera. Nothing is stopping it from using your camera, without your knowledge, and then uploading what it captures while a user browses their TikTok feed.

> Nothing is stopping it from using your camera, without your knowledge

The app needs to be open and in the foreground for it to take photos. On Android at least.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#114

Post by BelenusMordred »

kindle-dev wrote: post #86
est31 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The permissions of the app are one thing, whether the app does it is another. In theory what you say would be possible, yes, but does the TikTok app have a feature which allows remote enabling of the camera, i.e. without user interaction? The code is public and can be decompiled. TikTok is not in charge of application distribution either, Google is, so if they add such a feature, people might notice.

Modern apps are obfuscated and use certificate pinning to avoid network traffic introspection. It's really not simple to decompile an app into something understandable.

https://github.com/shroudedcode/apk-mitm

Removes certificate pinning from apk files for mitm inspection.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#115

Post by asiachick »

Johnny555 wrote: post #17

An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, It's not clear why TikTok is singled out here, this could just has easily been posted to Facebook or Instagram or one of the other myriad of social media platforms, or pushed automatically to someone's open photo album in the cloud. If OPSEC is important, don't let people bring their personal camera phon…

This seems short-sighted to me. In my fiction, in 10-20-30yrs we'll all have eye implants ala Black Mirror and we'll be so dependent on them that telling people they have to turn them off will be untenable.

Anytime I see "no photography" signs I can't help but think "living in the past". For example the immigration line in nearly every Airport says "no photos" and yet everyone in line is on their portable camera, um, I mean smartphone. It's like the people that wrote the sign are stuck in the 1970s and haven't bothered to look up at what people around them are actually doing.

It's the same in museums, sometimes there's an area "no photography allowed" and you can see them trying and utterly failing to enforce what is effectively unenforcable. If there are only a few patrons and they have a guard in every room they might stop 80%. But on a crowded day I doubt they catch 30%. It's ridiculous to see them try.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#116

Post by fragmede »

tablespoon wrote: post #65
Johnny555 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume that once a photo hits any social media, the Chinese and other adversaries (and allies) have already scraped it.

> I would assume that once a photo hits any social media, the Chinese and other adversaries (and allies) have already scraped it. Don't all the social media companies make it hard to scrape their sites, especially in bulk? It's definitely impossible to contain something once it's all over a bunch of blogs like this, but it might be possible to contain some things if caught early enough. There's also the private messa…

Facebook makes it difficult, but this where the question of "who's your adversary?" comes in. It's one thing to have to change user agent away from curl and rate limit, but when you're a nation-state and can afford to pay teams of people to do nothing else but collect information on your adversaries (in this case, the US military), having an actual person (so the traffic looks organic - because it is) who's full time job it is to just refresh that one Facebook group (never mind actually automating it), paying for a US Visa, a house, an ISP, all of their food needs. Against that level of advarsary (never mind trying to get your spies hired at Facebook as senior engineers), what sort of countermeasures do you imagine is possible by Facebook?

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#117

Post by zymhan »

vsnf wrote: post #97
kyleblarson wrote: post #58

I'm sure it's just because I'm too old to be in the target demographic but 9 times out of 10 when I see a Tik Tok video online (I don't have an account) the level of narcissism and lack of decorum on display is sickening.

Indeed, and you aren’t the only one who feels that way. There’s a relatively popular YouTube channel dedicated to documenting narcissism on social media https://youtube.com/shorts/iik6btbRXsw

That honestly sounds miserable, I'm amazed people go out of their way to get their Daily Hate.

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#118

Post by elmomle »

kbenson wrote: post #88
kindle-dev wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Publicly posting confidential information is definitely bad. Bringing a device that can covertly collect information for adversaries is even worse.

> I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Publicly posting confidential information is definitely bad. Bringing a device that can covertly collect enemies for adversaries is even worse. If you aren't posting top secret data, you also aren't sharing it with enemies on accident .

How certain are you that TikTok only gathers data of any kind when you, the user, ask it to?

Re: Secret military aircraft possibly exposed on TikTok

#120

Post by themacguffinman »

kbenson wrote: post #88
kindle-dev wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Publicly posting confidential information is definitely bad. Bringing a device that can covertly collect information for adversaries is even worse.

> I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Publicly posting confidential information is definitely bad. Bringing a device that can covertly collect enemies for adversaries is even worse. If you aren't posting top secret data, you also aren't sharing it with enemies on accident .

Who is disputing that you shouldn't share secret information on social networks? TikTok's ties still changes the potential impact of this breach. That's relevant information that gives context to the basic facts of the case that we usually call "the news".
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