Several people with whom she attempted to connect spotted the fakery, Mr. Ryan chose the photos, which he found on an amateur pornography site, “because she looked foreign” - which he said was another potential counterintelligence red flag - as well as for her attractiveness. special-forces military exercise, as a two-second Google search establishes.

Even her name is taken from the code name of an annual U.S. She claimed to have 10 years’ experience in the cybersecurity field - which would mean that she entered it at age 15 - and there is no such job as “cyber threat analyst” at the Naval Network Warfare Command. “Everything in her profile screamed fake,” he told The Times. Sage’s profile was bristling with what should have been red flags.

He added that he was surprised about the success of the effort, especially given that Ms. “These are all important violations of and ,” Mr. “He was connected to key people in other agencies.” He said that he reached out to the individual, and the misconfiguration was repaired.īut many other connections also inadvertently exposed personal data, including their home addresses and photos of their families.

“This person had a critical role in the intelligence community,” Mr. A contractor with the NRO who connected with her had misconfigured his profile so that it revealed the answers to the security questions on his personal e-mail account. One soldier uploaded a picture of himself taken on patrol in Afghanistan containing embedded data revealing his exact location. “If I can ever be of assistance with job opportunities here at Lockheed Martin, don’t hesitate to contact me, as I’m at your service,” one executive at the company told her. And there were many invitations to apply for jobs. Sage’s connections invited her to speak at a private-sector security conference in Miami, and to review an important technical paper by a NASA researcher. It is not the first time “white-hat” hackers have carried out such a social-engineering experiment, but military and intelligence security specialists told The Washington Times that the exercise reveals important vulnerabilities in the use of social networking by people in the national security field. Ryan calls “an independent ‘red team’ exercise.” Her profile was a ruse set up by security consultant Thomas Ryan as part of an effort to expose weaknesses in the nation’s defense and intelligence communities - what Mr.

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