It is amazing to me that something so insecure was used to communicate with spies in Iran and China. The US military gets non-stop information security training about using commercial websites and social media and here is American intelligence agencies operating an entire spy network on one:
Dozens of American spies were killed in Iran and China after a flawed communications service that allowed foreign foes to see what the agents were up to using Google, official sources have claimed.
Between 2009 and 2013 the US Central Intelligence Agency suffered a “catastrophic” secret communications failure in a website used by officers and their field agents around the world to speak to each other, according to a report in Yahoo News, which heard from 11 former intelligence and government officials about the previously unreported disaster.
“We’re still dealing with the fallout,” said one former national security official. “Dozens of people around the world were killed because of this.”
The internet-based communications platform was first used in the Middle East to communicate with soldiers in war zones and had not been intended for widespread use but due to its ease of use and efficacy, it was adopted by agents despite its lack of sophistication, the sources claimed.
Cracks only began to show when Iran, angered that the government under Barack Obama had discovered a secret Iranian nuclear weapon factory, went out with a fine tooth comb to find moles.
It discovered the existence of one of the websites used by US agents using Google. US officials believe that Iranian spies were able to use Google as a search tool to find secret CIA websites, unbeknown to those using them.
By 2011, Iran had infiltrated the CIA spy network and in May it announced that they had broken up a 30-strong ring of American spies.
Some informants were executed and others imprisoned as a result, the sources claimed.
This was corroborated by a report on ABC news at the time, which referred to a compromised communications system after a tip off from the CIA.
Meanwhile in China 30 agents working for the US were executed by the government after compromising the spy network using a similar means. Beijing had managed to break into a second temporary communications system, splintered from the initial platform and were able to see every single agent the CIA had placed in the country, the sources told Yahoo. [The Telegraph]
You can read more at the link, but you would think this would be bigger news with hearings and people being held accountable. I will let my readers draw their own conclusions on why this is not bigger news.