U.S. officials are increasingly sounding the alarm about LinkedIn as a tool of foreign influence in American affairs.
Officials say the online professional networking platform owned by Microsoft poses a threat for foreign influence and intelligence collection efforts, particularly by China.
William R. Evanina, director of U.S. counterintelligence, singled out LinkedIn last week, saying the networking platform could be weaponized by the members of the Chinese military whom the U.S. indicted on charges of hacking credit reporting giant Equifax and stealing data of more than 145 million Americans in 2017.
“They have more than just your credit score; they have all of your data,” Mr. Evanina said. That includes Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information such as bank account numbers. He said the data can be used as leverage to target vulnerable Americans inside and outside of government who have access to sensitive information and who can be reached through LinkedIn.
“When they get a LinkedIn from someone in China, they already know eveUse of LinkedIn by foreign adversaries is not a hypothetical concern. In a June 2018 felony complaint accusing former Defense Intelligence Agency case officer Ron Rockwell Hansen of spying on behalf of the Chinese, the FBI noted that Hansen “printed information from LinkedIn related to several former and current DIA case officers” ahead of a trip to China in 2015. Hansen was arrested in 2018 at a Seattle airport as he prepared to board a flight to China with secret U.S. military information, according to the Justice Department. Last year, Hansen pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
In November, a Justice Department official told CNBC that the Chinese had flipped U.S. intelligence officers after recruiting them off LinkedIn.
Mr. Evanina labeled such efforts “super aggressive” in an interview with Reuters. He said LinkedIn should look to delete fake users in a way similar to Twitter’s purge of fake accounts.
LinkedIn reported blocking 19.5 million fake accounts from registering in the first six months of 2019, and it reported restricting the use of 2 million more fake accounts via human reviews, artificial intelligence and machine learning during the same period.rything about that person,” Mr. Evanina said.
