US Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace and Facebook

The United States Marine Corps (USMC) are currently deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting day in day out against insurgency and terrorism under the constant threat of IEDs and enemy Kalashnikov or RPG fire. They bravely soldier on throughout.

However, when it comes to Web 2.0 they’re left quivering in their combat boots. The USMC has just announced that it is placing a network wide ban on Web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, MySpace and FaceBook in an effort to make their systems more secure.

They say that these sites are easily hacked and used by hackers and scammers and indeed those against US operations to post links to malicious sites in the hope a marine on R&R or a USMC staff member might click on them.

This would expose the soft underbelly of the USMC’s network and would lead to disaster. Here is what the USMC order read :

• “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries…”
• “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”