The National Pulse reported Wednesday, April 21, that British intelligence agencies are launching a campaign to combat foreign espionage against British civil servants, the vast majority of which is carried out by the Chinese Communist Party.
The Financial Times reported this week that the “Think Before You Link” campaign is a project coordinated by the Center for the Protection of British Infrastructure (CPNI), an arm of the British intelligence agency MI5, which advises governments and businesses on protective security.” The “Think Twice Before You Link” campaign was launched this week.
The project warns Britain’s 450,000 civil servants and partners in industry and academia that adversaries in Britain are creating fake online accounts to trap people with access to classified information. These are often, government employees with high-level security clearances, retired civil servants and those in the private sector who have access to classified or commercially sensitive technology, such as defense equipment. Foreign spies will pose as recruiters to lure these targeted individuals into in-person meetings, where interviewees may be bribed or blackmailed to obtain information.
Describing the scale of the cyber espionage threat, British intelligence said that a conservative estimate is that 10,000 British nationals have been approached by foreign spies in the past five years, and that “a significant number of these individuals” were “initially involved in espionage attempts.
The Financial Times said, “While officials would not say which countries or social media platforms were of most concern, the Communist Party has a long history of using the social networking site LinkedIn to trap spy targets. “
Last year, a U.S. court heard that an academic at George Washington University used LinkedIn on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence services to establish online connections with State Department officials, former military commanders, Pentagon employees and think-tank experts.
In 2019, former CIA officer Kevin Mallory was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the United States for passing military secrets to Chinese intelligence after first being contacted on Link.
The “Think Twice Before You Link” campaign recommends being wary of contacts who offer jobs that sound too good to be true, and reporting any suspicious practices to employers.
The “Think Twice Before You Link” campaign was tested in the UK three years ago, but is only now being launched publicly. All Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have adopted the U.K. version of “Think Twice Before You Link.
Commenting on the coordinated approach, Alan Kohler, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said foreign spies “must now contend with the combined efforts of five countries.”
Paul Rockwel, Link’s director of trust and security, said Link employees are actively looking for signs of “state-sponsored activity” and are using intelligence from a variety of sources, including government agencies, to remove fake accounts. Between January and June of last year, Collage removed 33.7 million fake accounts.
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