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Letter Re: Another COMSEC Warning on Social Networking Web Services

James,
This is a communications security (COMSEC) warning: Readers may wish to think about the networking tools used to communicate between friends and associates - Facebook, Linked-In, Jaiku,
Pownce, Yammer, and others - and realize that not only do they pose a serious threat to the security of their personal information, but some of them are now apparently being used to bring new people into the non-secure comms environment by falsifying "invitations" from others to join. While tools such as Outlook, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, Hotmail, Flickr, and MySpace should also be used with caution to limit the damage that could be caused by interception of sensitive information, I have found recently that Facebook is sending out invitations to join that did not come from the stated inviter. I was recently invited to join FaceBook by two different people that I know, but not very well. I wrote them each an E-mail and neither had extended any such invitation. One was not even involved in Facebook himself, and he said he had been getting invitations from East Coast relatives that he hardly knew. It would appear that some engine is finding past links between people and using the name of one to invite the
other to join Facebook, where information is much easier to gather than "point to point" communications such as Outlook. I had the same thing happen with Linked-In. A past business colleague appeared to send me an invite to "join her network of business associates." I checked with her directly and she denied having issued such an invitation.

Readers should be strongly cautioned that electronic communications are easily spoofed, intercepted, redirected and in many other ways rendered non-secure. Never trust electronic communications as if it were snail mail - for the moment, about the most secure way of sending information (other than to/from anyone in the military), unless you are face to face and have removed the battery from your cell phone.

COMSEC is an important part of living in today's world of eavesdroppers, both the innocuous ones and those with evil in mind. Learn about COMSEC from articles in Survival Blog's archives or from other online sources and then practice good COMSEC, as if everything sent electronically is going to be intercepted by your worst enemy and shared with everyone else in the world. - Ted in Idaho

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