Taliban insurgents are posing as ‘attractive women’ on Facebook to become friends with coalition soldiers and gather intelligence about their operations.
Australian board on review of social media and defense said that soldiers are being given pre-deployment briefings about the Taliban practice of creating fake profiles to spy on them. Personnel have also been briefed on geo-tagging, a function of many websites that secretly records the location from where a post is published or a photo is uploaded. The report said that of the1577 defense members surveyed for the review, a majority had no awareness regarding the practice and 58 percent of the staff had no social media training. The review also took notice of sharing of sensitive information online by the family members of soldiers and inadvertently jeopardizing missions.
Three Australian soldiers were gunned down allegedly by an Afghan Army trainee this month.
