Researchers used bogus Facebook and Instagram accounts to "instill undesirable behavior" among NATO troops participating in an exercise, according to a report on digital risks to military members.
The goal of the experiment, conducted by NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, was to "exploit social media and open source data to gather information on and influence military personnel during a military exercise,” according to the report titled “The Current Digital Arena and its Risks to Serving Military Personnel.”
The NATO group "attempted to answer three questions,” Nora Biteniece, a software engineer who helped design the project, told Wired, which first reported the details.
“The first question is, What can we find out about a military exercise just from open source data? What can we find out about the participants from open source data? And, can we use all this data to influence the participants’ behaviors against their given orders?”
She said the answer was you can find out a lot from open source data, including Facebook profiles and people-search websites — and that the data can be used to influence members of the armed forces.
The total cost of the experiment was $60, Wired reported.
"The level of personal detail we found was very detailed and enabled us to instill undesirable behavior during the exercise," the report said, adding its own experiment was “limited” compared with "large-scale efforts such as the work undertaken by the Kremlin's Internet Research Agency to influence the US presidential election 2016."
“We identified a significant amount of people taking part in the exercise and managed to identify all members of certain units, pinpoint the exact locations of several battalions, gain knowledge of troop movements to and from exercises, and discover the dates of the active phases of the exercise," the report said.
The experiment used Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to gather information, but Twitter “was rarely used during the exercise, and gave no useful information."
"Our experiment showed that, at the current level of information security, an adversary is able to collect a significant amount of personal data on soldiers participating in a military exercise, and that this data can be used to target messages with precision, successfully influencing members of the target audience to carry out desired behaviors," the report added.
The experiment got some some challenges from social media companies — and the report found Facebook in particular “provided significant pushback,” suspending several of the fake accounts and pages during the experiment.
"We have seen some hybrid warfare tactics used against NATO troops in the eastern part of our Alliance, including disinformation, false allegations of criminal activity, and attempts to hack or intimidate our soldiers on social media," an unnamed NATO official told CNN.
"It is important that NATO Allies continue to train their troops to be vigilant, including online. At the same time, we are strengthening our cyber defenses and taking all necessary measures to protect our networks," the official told CNN.
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