For today s Mexican cartel Facebook and an IP address is asinvaluable as machine guns and armour-piercing bullets, says BradBarker, president and founder of US intelligence contractor, HALOcorporation. In Barker s view, cyberspace is the new battleground andsocial media is the weapon of choice, of course backed by actualweapons, killers, and transport for shifting drugs and humans. The problem for US law enforcement is that Mexican drug cartelshave been quicker than them to embrace social media, such asFacebook but also blogs, for intelligence gathering, Barker told the AusCERT conference in Queensland . Media and social media is the weapon of mass effect , saidBarker. They re killing people, they re using media to get their wordout. It s media that s the payload, he said. Facebook has allowed cartel members to automate intelligencegathering processes that would have taken trained intelligencegatherers years to acquire. As evidence of his claim, Barker pointed to the La Familia Mexicancartel which recently incorporated Facebook into its mode ofoperation for human trafficking. The cartel would plant ateenager, illegally brought in to the US from Mexico, in anexpensive US private school as part of a human trafficking program. The kid attends class, gets good grades, joins sports teams, getspopular. They get on Facebook, they Friend everybody. I Like you, ILike you, I Like you, he said. What sounds like a convoluted method of intelligence gathering isin fact highly efficient, said Barker. As the social network built up, La Familia shot-callers inMexico were logging in to the plant s Facebook page and scouringit for human trafficking targets. And they said, bring me her, bring me her and bring me her, hesaid, with the kidnapping decision based on visibility, value andvulnerability. They re doing this remotely from a foreign country with agentsin the US, and they re using Facebook to automate the process oftarget selection. Another turning point for Mexican cartels use of technologyoccurred after the confusing standoff between Anonymous and theZeta cartel over an allegedly kidnapped Mexican blogger who had anaffiliation Anonymous. Anonymous threat to expose members of the cartel was met with theresponse that 10 people would be killed for every person whosedetails it leaked. The blogger was released but Anonymous backeddown and chose to sit on the information they claimed to hold. Anonymous, a hacker group - very powerful - basically bailed onOperation Zeta. And now the Zetas ... went up against the mostsophisticated hacktivist group in the world and prevailed. While not everyone would agree with Barker s assessment ofAnonymous, the Zeta s triumph sent a very serious message to lawenforcement in the region that these guys are standing virtuallyuncontested. More importantly, the event inspired the Zetas to invest in ITtraining that would be used to silence Mexican bloggers. The Zetas got confident and started to outsource some trainingfor how to do IP trace routing. They learned how to tag, track,locate and eliminate the people that were blogging the cartel sactivities, said Barker. It was chocking off their revenue streams... They had to put anend to it. And how did they do it? The same old way they have been:by killing people in a public way and torturing them and thenwriting notes to the media in their own blood that this is whathappens to you if you blog about the Zetas. #auscert2012 Follow @CSO_Australia and sign up to the CSO Australia newsletter . We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Portable Facial Bed Manufacturer , Facial Steamer Machine for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Vacuum Slimming Machine.
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