Robin Sage accumulated a total of about 300 connections on LinkedIn. She befriended 110 people on Facebook, and her Twitter account gathered 141 followers in just 28 days. Indeed, Looks can be deceptive!

Robin Sage

What if I say this is just a fake profile? Nothing new, there are many in social networking sites. However, it is not just a fake profile but a profile created by Tom Ryan, a cyber security expert to find out how social networking sites could be used to covertly gather intelligence. Interesting, eh!

Robin was invited by her affluent and influential contacts to conferences and review documents. She was even offered jobs in big companies including Google and Lockheed Martin. Perhaps, her personality as an attractive chick, somewhat flirty cybergeek, and with a posh degree from MIT may have lured men and women from the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, information security companies and government contractors into befriending her.

Ryan said, “There is a lot of information leaked people don’t know about.” Tom Ryan says people unknowingly revealed sensitive information to “Robin” through what they thought were harmless acts like posting photos. Ryan points out “If you use an iPhone, it will give the exact location where you are, the name of the person who owns it and the version of the software, different information like that.”

Tom Ryan is going to present his findings tittled as “Getting in Bed with Robin Sage” at the Black Hat Technical Security Conference in Las Vegas. Tom says : “I had access to email and bank accounts. I saw patterns in the kind of friends they had. The LinkedIn profiles would show patterns of new business relationships.”

This is a lesson for people (especially “men” who were 82% of Sage’s friends) who befriend people without knowing them personally. Internet is no longer as harmless as it used to be a decade ago.