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The experience, led by NATO's Center for Excellence in Strategic Communications, was aimed at "harnessing social media and open source data to collect information about military personnel during a military exercise." and influence it.
"The level of personal detail that we found was very detailed and allowed us to instill unwanted behavior during exercise," the report says, adding that the scope of the experiment was "limited "Compared to" large-scale efforts such as the Kremlin's Internet Research Agency work has taken the initiative to influence the 2016 US presidential election. "
"We have identified a significant number of people participating in the exercise and have managed to identify all the members of some units, to accurately locate the location of several battalions, to gain an understanding of troop movements to destination and from the exercises and to discover the dates of the active phases of the exercise, "says the report.
The experiment used Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to gather information, although the report says that Twitter "was rarely used during the exercise and gave no useful information".
"Our experience has shown that at the current level of information security, an adversary is able to collect a significant amount of personal data on soldiers participating in a military exercise, and that this data can be used to target messages accurately, successfully influencing members According to the report, the target audience must adopt the desired behaviors, "added the report, noting that this effort encountered some difficulties when social media companies rejected some of the fake accounts, stating that they "intensified their efforts to prevent abuses of their platforms".
The report states that "Facebook in particular has provided significant repression", suspending many of the fake accounts and pages used during the experiment.
NATO regularly organizes large-scale exercises to keep its military forces in a state of readiness. One of the most recent exercises, Trident Juncture, took place in October-November and involved about 50,000 people from NATO and partner countries, as well as hundreds of aircraft, dozens of ships and up to 10,000 military vehicles.
Although the efforts detailed in the report are just an experiment, officials said Russia has also used social media and other measures to influence NATO troops deployed near the eastern border of the country. alliance with Russia.
"We have seen some hybrid warfare tactics being used against NATO troops in the eastern part of our Alliance, including misinformation, false allegations of criminal activity, and attempted hacking or cracking. intimidation of our soldiers on social media, "CNN official told CNN.
"It is important that Allies continue to train their troops to be vigilant, including online, and at the same time, we are strengthening our cyber defense and taking all necessary measures to protect our networks," he added.
NATO has strengthened its military presence in the eastern part of the alliance, an approach seen primarily as a response to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014 and to the capture of Crimea by Moscow.
Some 4,500 NATO troops are deployed in four multinational battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
The battle groups are led by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and the United States respectively.
The Latvian Center for Strategic Communications of Excellence based in Latvia was launched in 2014.
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