Swedish Bodyguards Reveal Prime Minister's Location on Fitness App (politico.eu) 18
Swedish security service members who shared details of their running and cycling routes on fitness app Strava have been accused of revealing details of the prime minister's location, including his private address. Politico: According to Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, on at least 35 occasions bodyguards uploaded their workouts to the training app and revealed information linked to Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, including where he goes running, details of overnight trips abroad, and the location of his private home, which is supposed to be secret.
Is it public by default? (Score:2)
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Well, a big part of posting to Strava is to share with your friends, it's sort of a social media for active people, so by default it's pretty open, last time I set up an account.
There are lots of privacy options, but pretty sure you need to enable them.
But really I think the bodyguards are to blame. I don't know why they're tracking their physical activity while on the job in the first place.
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The thing is though, this really should have been caught early and prevented by swedens intelligence services.
Like a lot of these sorts of mini tech scandals they seem to be about non tech people accidently doing something stupid that tech people probably wouldn't. You can't expect some bodybuilding security guard to be a guru on IT security. He's a big dude who punches people for a living. He's not hired to redteam the presidents comms stack. He's hired to punch strange behaving people in the head if they
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This is a dupe [slashdot.org] of a dupe* [theguardian.com], sort of.
Strava is absolutely awesome, especially the heat map feature. I do not believe exercise sessions are public by default.
*Can't find the slashdot story given my available time for this.
S'not that bad (Score:2)
I mean, it's not like they broadcasted it on Signal...
Rookie mistake. (Score:4, Funny)
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This kind of leak has been known about for years (Score:4, Insightful)
When going on duty to a sensitive location all personal mobile 'phoned must be left at home in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.” --- switching them off while on duty is not enough.
To make this work the employer must provide locked down 'phones with minimal apps installed; if this means that the security guard cannot chat with his lover on Instagram/whatever then tough shit - they are well paid to protect someone not to chat on social media while on assignment. This might also make the guards more effective as they will not have social media distractions when they are supposed to be keeping an eye out for assassins/whatever.
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the security guard cannot chat with his lover on Instagram/whatever then tough shit
I agree with you but that would require them to be very strong-minded. Which they could be, but is not their typical selection criteria. We certainly need to implement more "loose lips sink ships" sort of training for these people.
they are well paid to protect someone not to chat
For what I know they're servicemen and receive the same as other police officer / state guards of same rank. It's not bad but not a high pay job. Depends what you call well paid.
They took notes from the Trump admin (Score:2)
Hegseth and so on talking about bombing Yemen in a chat app? Ok, we'll let you track our PM.
Didn't we see this w/ "secret" US Afghan bases? (Score:3)
This keeps happening. It seems we IT folks aren't doing a good enough job getting the word out about the issues with IoT devices.
Same scandal, different country (Score:3)
This is the same problem US special forces had a few years ago in Afghanistan and Iraq, where their fitness app tracked their movement.
It would appear that a lot of top tier special ops types, be they military or civilian are very competitive about their physical conditioning, and tracking apps really helped enabled healthy competition.
But also gave up their positions when they really shouldn't.
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It would appear that a lot of top tier special ops types, be they military or civilian are very competitive about their physical conditioning
Particularly Meal Team Six [9cache.com].
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No, actual special ops guys. The people who actually need to be fit, because they did overwhelming majority of work. So they needed to do daily runs etc, and tend to be very competitive with each other. So they all used same couple of fitness apps that tracked them so they could compare performance to each other.
OK but (Score:2)