Cyber hackers used a fake page of Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis, the Supreme Commander of Europe Allied Forces, on Facebook to find out information about him from his friends, reported The Telegraph.
The Guardian directly blames the attack on Chinese cyber-spies. At the same time NATO officials said they did not have information about who is behind the attack.
Attackers on behalf Stavridis, “add friends” with senior military officials of Great Britain. To do this, they created a page identical to the real one. It’s unkown for how long hackers operate and how much information they were able to get.
It is reported that there were several bogus pages. They were removed last year, but this was the first time of an attack to the representatives of NATO in Europe.
Stavridis became the head of NATO forces in Europe in May 2009, he is an active user of social networks. The Admiral has almost eight thousand fans on Facebook. In particular, he announced on his page the end of the military campaign in Libya in October 2011.
Stavridis have an account on Twitter for more than nine thousand followers.
Chinese hackers are not the first time accused of using Facebook in their hacking activities. As noted by The Telegraph, in 2011 in an operation codenamed “Night Dragon”, hackers used information from the pages of the heads of major oil and gas companies in the social network to find out their passwords and other data.
It was found that the attackers acted with the Chinese territory, and only on weekdays from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm local time. This led to the speculation that the activities of hackers is their main place of work – in the office or at the government facility. The Chinese authorities usually deny any involvement in the cyber-attacks from the territory of the country.