- At a site in northern Syria near a dam, where analysts have suspected the U.S. military is building a base, the map shows a small blob of activity accompanied by an intense line along the nearby dam, suggesting the personnel at the site jog regularly along the dam, Schneider said.
“This is a clear security threat,” he said. “You can see a pattern of life. You can see where a person who lives on a compound runs down a street to exercise. In one of the U.S. bases at Tanf you can see people running round in circles.”
“Big opsec and persec fail,” tweeted Nick Waters, a former British army officer who pinpointed the location of his former base in Afghanistan using the map. “Patrol routes, isolated patrol bases, lots of stuff that could be turned into actionable intelligence.”
Reminds me of this from /r/Army last week:OPSEC-Friendly reminder to change your snapchat location to private.
I think technology is an ever-changing attack surface for the military. Nobody thought to keep WoW off the computers they use to fly UAVs until they caught a keylogger.
Quite a few of my college buds ended up in the military. One of them worked to maintain the computers while overseas in Kuwait and Iraq during our occupation in Iraq. He had all sorts of anecdotes about the crazy dumb things people would do. We're talking about the network security equivalent of putting a fork into a wall outlet or standing on a ladder as it rests on moving forklift or putting your exposed arm down a badger hole just to see if anyone's home.
At least in the Army, only since 2014 has there even existed a branch dealing with the entire "cyber" domain of war. One of my instructors was part of its creation and he was transferred from being a tank commander to designing the Cyber branch.
I think this has been completely blown out of proportion simply because it lets armchair "analysts" learn about overseas bases. None of these activities will be at all hidden from people in the vicinity. It's pretty obvious if Marines have erected a blast fence around a FOB. It's pretty obvious when flights resume at a supposedly abandoned airport. None of this "intelligence" will be new knowledge to the hostile neighbors of these installations.
Lines of activity extending out of bases and back may indicate patrol routes. The map of Afghanistan appears as a spider web of lines connecting bases, showing supply routes, as does northeast Syria, where the United States maintains a network of mostly unpublicized bases. Concentrations of light inside a base may indicate where troops live, eat or work, suggesting possible targets for enemies. You're thinking big picture. Patterns of life, places of activity, patrol routes.. All incredibly useful information. It takes huge amounts of manpower and time to collect this information, and we just went up and handed it to anybody with an internet connectionBut the data also offers a mine of information to anyone who wants to attack or ambush U.S. troops in or around the bases, Schneider said, including patterns of activity inside the bases. Many people wear their fitness trackers all day to measure their total step counts, and soldiers appear to be no exception, meaning the maps reveal far more than just their exercise habits.