A cyber warrior and their use of social networking sites
A cyber warrior is someone who engages in cyber warfare for personal reasons, religious ideals, or the sake of their country's security. There are several varieties of cyber warriors depending on the function they have taken on, but they all deal with data security in some form. Cyber warriors typically waged combat using a computer, either attacking or defending other systems. In terms of using social networks to obtain information, cyber warriors who do lawful security and those who undertake criminal operations use a similar model of services. This age of technology has enabled security specialists as well as cyber criminals to be successful in the gathering of information. This collection of information for cyber warfare by both parties is made easy by social networking platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Social networking sites not only involve exchange of information from one person to another but also to many other people which promotes the attack surface. Criminal cyber warriors can introduce malware across many different organizations and data from an entire community is then collected. This paper will discuss the motives of cyber warriors, what social networking is, and the different ways in which cyber warriors utilize social networking sites to obtain data.
How Cyber Warriors Use Social Networking Sites to Gain Information
A cyber warrior usually has a lot of options in which they can collect open source information. It is effortless for a cyber warrior to gather information when they have a specific target. In 2016 Facebook had over one billion users enabling the possibility of knowing the birth date, hometown, school, and other personal information of a user. This easily found information has made Facebook a common site of gathering information. Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are other alternatives of gathering information. Each of these four social media platforms has over 100 million different users and can provide exploitable information that is vital for the target of a cyber warrior. When a cyber warrior is gathering information on a target, they can collect critical data that they can exploit. For instance, when a picture is posted on social media with the location embedded in it, the cyber warrior can operate by taking advantage of the knowledge of the location of their target. If a cyber warrior has a target and uses the location data of a picture from the past where the target lived, they can then obtain the new site information from a picture that was posted recently. When a cyber warrior examines in contrast photos from the past and present, they can be able to ascertain whether their target is home or not and this results in the possibilities of extortion practices, break-ins, and kidnappings.
The Profitability of Social Networking for Cyber Warriors
In the same way collecting information through social media platforms by a security professional cyber warrior is advantageous to offensive and defensive operations it is also profitable for a criminal. A cyber warrior can utilize the same information and location as ways of exploitation on social networks to find out the relationship of a person to others, their pictures, location data, email addresses, and other information that is identifiable. The U.S. Military drone strikes are an example of security personnel who took advantage of social networks to capitalize on criminal information. The United States Air Force has been obtaining posts by terrorist organizations like ISIL from social media to conduct drone strikes with (JDAM) Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs. In order to direct missiles, JDAM bombs use a GPS to direct ordinary missiles to the targeted location with an error rate that is less than 40 feet. The GPS targeting of JDAM greatly depends on the location embedded in the posted images. Another way of collecting information from social networks is through analytical pivoting. This method enables the security personnel to identify relationships through a single target. For instance, the analytical pivoting can allow a security professional or criminal to focus on an origin and their correlations, and this can result in the obtaining of new leads and additional data.
Social Engineering and its Role in Cyber Warfare
Social engineering is another method of gaining information from social media in it is one of the most intrusive ways that cyber warriors use. Social engineering can be explained as the art of manipulating people into doing things or disclosing information that is confidential through different mediums. Cyber warriors can make use of social networks to launch an attack on an organization through the gathering of information on people who are associated with the group. The cyber warrior pretends to be an individual associated with the organization and then spoof a message which might result in a user compromising data without knowing as they fall into the trap set by the cyber warrior. The cyber warrior can use a social network like Facebook whereby they can feign association with a party that is legitimately resulting in the compromise of an unsuspecting victim.
Conclusion
The social networks connect between a specific number of individuals through the exploitation of criminal cyber warrior's and individual cyber security. The personal information that is identified on social media platforms makes it possible for alteration and misuse of data. The obvious methods of exploitation are through the location of data, the target of information and social gathering. Therefore the cyber warriors have succeeded to exploit and manipulate the user's information because of criminal and intelligence gain. Anyone, in this case, can be a victim to the utilization of cyber warrior's platforms, and the best prevention method was to be vigilant in practices that concerned cyber security.
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