US warns that soldiers are targets of threats with leaked data

United States soldiers deployed to war zones have been the target of threats due to commercially available location data, according to reports received by military authorities.

In a letter, Centcom (U.S. Central Command) said it had "received multiple threat reports regarding adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel."

The document was shared with Reuters by US Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

The message, sent on April 14, gave no further details, but Centcom's area of responsibility includes the Persian Gulf, where U.S. forces are engaging the Iranian military in the Strait of Hormuz.

The revelation was the first official confirmation that American soldiers had been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers said in a letter sent Thursday to the Pentagon.

"Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their standard of living, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned.

Wyden said in a statement that it was time to "start treating the adtech sector as a threat to national security."

The Pentagon did not return messages seeking comment. The lawmakers said in their letter that their efforts to obtain more information from military officials about the reported target were unsuccessful.

Data collected from cell phones and apps
Location data is widely used in digital advertising, which is an important source of revenue for many technology companies.

Typically, this data is collected from smartphones or other devices by apps or service providers before being sold to data brokers who collect and resell the information, sometimes through complex networks of intermediaries.

While the privacy threat inherent in selling the details of people's everyday movements on the open market has long been a matter of public discussion, its potential as a security risk has also recently attracted concern.

As early as 2016, a U.S. defense contractor was able to leverage commercially available location data to track special operations forces from their bases in the United States to a sensitive point in Syria, according to a report first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

More recently, journalists from Wired and two German news agencies used billions of coordinates collected by a data broker to expose the comings and goings of people at 11 U.S. military and intelligence facilities in or around Germany.

Two groups representing digital advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, did not return emails seeking comment.

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Source: CNN