Social networking websites make recruiting spies difficult

For civilians, this is hardly more than an annoyance. For the security services, however, the wrong details in the wrong hands could be a matter of life or death.

Even more worrying is the ease with which ‘live' accounts can be hacked. The Twitter incident at the beginning of the year, in which 33 celebrity accounts – including that of Britney Spears – were hijacked and used to spread scandalous rumours about their owners through the forgotten password function, is a case in point.

On the same website, a phishing campaign hit hundreds of users – including Stephen Fry – by posting links to sites that could steal their login credentials through the account of Barack Obama.

Take from this what you will, but a good start would be to have a crack at profiling yourself online. Find out what's already in the public domain, so at least you know where you might start in wiping the slate clean.

I did this as a favour for MI5 recently, looking at the information available online about its director-general, Jonathan Evans.

The intelligence agency appears to have handled the information available about him rather well, feeding carefully considered snippets to the press. No doubt this policy was implemented after the depressing ‘outing' of a previous director-general's home address by a journalist some years ago. Although I could find bits and pieces of value (school, university, a possible mother's maiden name etc), the online identity was being very well managed.

However, the biggest single defence of the latest head of MI5 has to be his surname. How many ‘Evans' are there in the world? It's like finding a needle in a stack of identical needles. It would have been somewhat easier if his surname were a little less widespread. ‘Manningham-Buller', for instance, would have been perfect!

You could consider becoming ex-directory, have yourself removed from the edited Electoral Roll, delete any social networking profiles (don't forget old Friends Reunited appearances). And Google yourself, to see where you pop up. Sadly, though, you'll struggle to remove yourself from the register of births, deaths and marriages. Men in Black makes identity removal look easy, but getting the proverbial white Persian cat back in the bag is harder than it seems.

See original article on scmagazineuk.com