Strava opsec fail
2018-01-28 23:38:03.328644+00 by
Dan Lyke
2 comments
U.S. soldiers are revealing
sensitive and dangerous information by jogging:
The Global Heat Map,
published by the GPS tracking company Strava, uses satellite information to map the
location and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year
period, by illuminating areas of activity.
And, of course, this reveals that there are a large number of Strava users in very small
clusters, and that those Strava users tend to travel between some sites which are known US
holdings, and some sites which aren't...
[ related topics:
Maps and Mapping
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: Strava opsec fail made: 2018-01-29 11:53:09.793118+00 by:
DaveP
Perhaps because they were wearing tactical rather than strategic pants?
#Comment Re: Strava opsec fail made: 2018-01-29 17:11:51.720485+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Must be.
Fitness-Tracker App Exposes Security Flaw at Taiwan’s Missile Command Center:
Now here is the problem. This is only one of several missile bases in Taiwan—an important one, to be sure, but there are others, and some of those locations may still be secret. (At the Middlebury Institute of International studies at Monterey, we try to track these bases pretty closely. We’re confident we know where several are located, for example, but not all of them.) But Strava’s database has one more piece of information, one that is not accessible through the heat map but would be to the company, any client which might purchase the data and any hacker that might steal it. Strava knows which user made each track. That’s charming when it’s a celebrity uploading a run. But what about a soldier? Soldiers, remember, rotate from one assignment to the next. Which means Strava can continue to track each user as he or she rotates to the next assignment, burning one secret missile base after another with all those calories. Yes, if our user casually jogging by Taiwanese missiles day-after-day suddenly appears deployed to a new location, well that’s very interesting if you are targeting missiles for China’s Rocket Force.