British volunteers looking to head to Ukraine to help with fighting the Russian invasion have been given stark warning about their online activity.
As it stands, more than 20,000 volunteers fro all across the world have joined the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine – including several from the UK.
But now a post in a volunteering group on Reddit has told them not to post selfies online because Russia could hack the photos.
The post, written by Wisdom_is_Contraband, states: “I work in the cybersecurity field, and I can't tell you how trivial it is to get your geolocation from a picture or video you've taken.
“Stop taking selfies – stop uploading pictures.
“Even if you remove the metadata, where your actual GPS location is saved at the time of recording, there are still so many context clues that'll be in your photo, like street signs, skylines, topology, landmarks, that can easily be used to zero in on your position.
“At least two barracks now full of people have been obliterated because people just can't help but take selfies.
“This is a war. This is not a vacation. Stop. Taking. F**king. Selfies.
“And stop sharing them! Stop upvoting them! You are literally getting people killed! This is not a joke!”
The post was headlined “Watch you OPSEC”, which stands for operations security.
This is a security and risk management process and strategy that classifies information, then determines what is required to protect sensitive information and prevent it from getting into the wrong hands.
Essentially, anyone posting images in Ukraine, runs the risk of exposing their own location and putting themselves at risk.
One user, Vorhersagen, wrote: “If you don't know the term OPSEC you might not want to volunteer for war in the first place.
“In fact, if you've been to war, been bombed, buried people you might realize war isn't for LARPER's (people who play Live Action Role Playing games) in the first place.
“If you know war and loss you ain't going to volunteer to go into it again especially for another country not your own.”
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