U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
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Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#2What an interesting time to be in intelligence gathering.
Why even bother breaking into an air gapped DoD network to get classified data when you can target all these third party cloud companies that have secondary data that isn't air gapped in classified networks, and most won't have the security resources to really lock things down.
This is somewhere in the awkward middle between what's called "open source intelligence" and traditional intelligence.
I don't envy defensive cybersecurity staff and their jobs/responsibilities.
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#3What an interesting time to be in intelligence gathering. Why even bother breaking into an air gapped DoD network to get classified data when you can target all these third party cloud companies that have secondary data that isn't air gapped in classified networks, and most won't have the security resources to really lock things down. This is somewhere in the awkward middle between what's called "open source intellig…
One of the jokes going around Twitter last night was whether or not Strava would be able to handle the server load from all the intelligence agencies breaking in and dumping their data.
This isn't just heat maps they have, they have the movement and timestamped location of millions of people around the world. Undoubtedly some of those people are "interesting" to someone, especially since Strava just revealed that a lot of them hang out in unique places.
edit: For example: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/957851350099832834
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#4What an interesting time to be in intelligence gathering. Why even bother breaking into an air gapped DoD network to get classified data when you can target all these third party cloud companies that have secondary data that isn't air gapped in classified networks, and most won't have the security resources to really lock things down. This is somewhere in the awkward middle between what's called "open source intellig…
One of the jokes going around Twitter last night was whether or not Strava would be able to handle the server load from all the intelligence agencies breaking in and dumping their data. This isn't just heat maps they have, they have the movement and timestamped location of millions of people around the world. Undoubtedly some of those people are "interesting" to someone, especially since Strava just revealed that a l…
Geez yeah no kidding. And they'll have other account data like first and last names. But then again, it's likely they've already been hacked (same with FitBit) and don't even know it.
The data these companies have is too valuable, cleanly IoT collected, and keyed by email, for nation states to not try to get.
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#5I think that the idea of privacy is wishful thinking if the people in these locations are allowed to have their own unvetted electronics. It would not take more than one trojan smartphone application with a social media login until you are able to identify the person (and maybe graph more out of that, no GPS needed!).
And as an anecdote, back during my conscription, we were told to disable location services altogether and not take photos during training sessions, but I honestly think it had more to do with keeping in mind the best practices rather than avoiding anything to get "leaked". The officers were sometimes seen with phones of their own, meaning the government issued tinfoil ones.
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#6One popular route on a base in Iraq has been nicknamed “Base Perimeter” by the U.S. runners who regularly use it.
I'm truly gobsmacked that it never occurred to anyone that this might pose a problem. Maybe not the 19 year old grunt who signed up because getting a master's in CS wasn't in his future, but c'mon, there isn't someone responsible for preventing data leakage? This is not some corner case, or some side-channel attack; Strava's whole business model rotates around "track where you've been with extreme accuracy, and let the world know about it". Otherwise I'd just keep the data locally, like I did in the old days.
But even if kept locally, what happened to the worry of radio leakage? Ten years ago I worked on some stuff that might end up being used by the military, and I distinctly remember a co-worker who used to be pretty high up in the army (colonel, maybe?) pointing out that in the field things like Bluetooth, et. al., were generally frowned upon for what I thought would be obvious reasons. Perhaps with the subsequent advent of more and more devices emitting radio signals, what used to be obvious isn't so obvious anymore, so now we let military personnel run around with devices on their wrist that signal to anyone within 30m that they're there.
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#7What activity would generate the tracks in the middle of the ocean? As I understand Strava whenever I switch it on it tracks my activity at that moment until I switch it off. Looking at the heat maps I get the impression that there is always on data being tracked in addition to those that are intending to track a specific activity. Do fitbit worn 24/7 submit data constantly to strava?
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#8One popular route on a base in Iraq has been nicknamed “Base Perimeter” by the U.S. runners who regularly use it. I'm truly gobsmacked that it never occurred to anyone that this might pose a problem. Maybe not the 19 year old grunt who signed up because getting a master's in CS wasn't in his future, but c'mon, there isn't someone responsible for preventing data leakage? This is not some corner case, or some side-chan…
> Maybe not the 19 year old grunt who signed up because getting a master's in CS wasn't in his future
Can we please drop the elitist attitude and explicit assertion that enlisted military personnel are stupid and that CS students are intelligent.
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#9I saw this unfolding bit by bit and thought: Wow, these people have not been paying attention during the AOL 'anonymized' research database fiasco.
Let's wait to see how long it will take before someone figures out how to ID the security detail jogging with a president somewhere.
Re: U.S. military revising its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data
#10What activity would generate the tracks in the middle of the ocean? As I understand Strava whenever I switch it on it tracks my activity at that moment until I switch it off. Looking at the heat maps I get the impression that there is always on data being tracked in addition to those that are intending to track a specific activity. Do fitbit worn 24/7 submit data constantly to strava?
Running on cruise ships, maybe?