Published: · Region: Middle East · Category: cyber

Strava Data Leak Puts U.S. Troops at Risk and Shows How Fitness Apps Become Intelligence Tools

More than 1,300 Strava users have publicly shared workout routes in and around U.S. military bases in the Middle East, revealing patterns of life, troop movements and even activity at sites absent from public maps. Security specialists warn that adversaries like Iran can fuse this data with other intelligence to map facilities and target individual personnel.

A smartphone jog around a base perimeter might feel like a brief escape from deployment. In parts of the Middle East, it may also have become a data trail that foreign intelligence services can mine to track U.S. troops and map out some of Washington’s most sensitive sites. New analysis has found that more than 1,300 users of the fitness app Strava shared workout information from U.S. military bases across the region, making their running and cycling routes visible to anyone with access to the platform. The data shows not just rough locations but detailed paths, routines and patterns of activity, including at installations that do not appear on public…

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