NATO's top military commander has been targeted by a social engineering attempt - with Chinese spies blamed for the attack.
According to a report in the Observer, the simple scam involved the perpetrators setting up a false Facebook account in the name of Admiral James Stavridis, and trying to persuade friends and family to befriend that account.
NATO said it wasn't clear who was behind the social engineering attack that could have been used to develop a picture of the admiral's personal life, although security experts have pointed the finger at China.
The most senior people in NATO were warned about this kind of activity
A NATO official told the paper that Stavridis - the supreme allied commander Europe (SACEUR) - had been targeted on several occasions in the past two years.
"There have been several fake SACEUR pages,” a spokesperson said. “Facebook has cooperated in taking them down… the most important thing is for Facebook to get rid of them."
The security threat is the latest in a series of attacks blamed on China, with experts in the US and UK blaming the country for a series of military and corporate intrusions in recent years. NATO said it had raised the issue of social network impersonation with its staff.
According to the report, NATO was now in regular contact with Facebook account managers and that the fake pages were usually deleted within 24 to 28 hours of being discovered. A spokesperson for Facebook told us: "We removed the profile for violating our terms within a business day of receiving a report."
With high-level hacks notoriously difficult to prove with precision, officials have been reluctant to point the finger at China publicly, but another security source told the Observer that “the most senior people in NATO were warned about this kind of activity. The belief is that China is behind this".
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