The Taliban has come a long way since the days when, pre-American invasion, they ruled the roost in Afghanistan, banning all forms of technology in their efforts to create an Islamic civilization free from western influences. Since being forced out of power, Islamic militants have become past masters in using the internet for propaganda purposes, spreading their messages through websites and videos posted online.

So it doesn’t come as much surprise to learn that quite a few Taliban activists have begun using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to further their cause as well. However, it’s the way they’ve been using it that has raised a few eyebrows…

Let’s just pretend for a moment: You’re a lonely young soldier, stationed at Bagram Airfield for eight, long months with nothing better to do than avoid getting shot and blown up, and, in your spare time, login to Facebook to see how everyone’s getting on back at home. Now imagine one day, you receive a friend request. The girl is absolutely gorgeous, so naturally you accept.

You’re not worried about security – after all, your Facebook account has all kinds of privacy controls in place, so anything you post there is pretty secure.

The problem is, the attractive woman you’ve been flirting with over the past few weeks may well not be an attractive woman at all – there’s a growing risk that ‘she’ could actually be a tech-savvy Taliban.

A recent security report from the Australian government has revealed that Taliban insurgents are increasingly taking to social media sites, posing as ‘attractive women’ and even ‘old school friends’ in order to gain information about their foes – and most soldiers are completely unaware of it or the risks that social media can expose them to.

One of the key concerns is the so-called geo-tagging feature of Facebook – a process that logs the location of every status update, every comment, and every photo uploaded to the website.

Australian military chiefs are so worried that they’ve started issuing pre-deployment warnings to troops heading overseas that they could be targeted online by the Taliban, reminding them that Facebook’s security settings are made redundant when they start accepting friend requests.

According to the report:

“Media personnel and enemies create fake profiles to gather information. For example, the Taliban have used pictures of attractive women as the front of their Facebook profiles and have befriended soldiers.”

It gets worse too, with the report stating that soldiers, their friends and their families are also unwittingly putting the lives of armed forces personnel at risk, by sharing information such as names, ranks and locations. To back up its claims, the reports surveyed 1,557 military personnel, finding that the majority of them did not realize that people could use fake profiles to capture their movements.

This isn’t the first time that the military has been bitten by social media either. A few years ago, whilst stationed in Iraq, a group of US soldiers uploaded photos of Apache helicopters parked up inside a military compound. Unfortunately, because the images were geo-tagged, enemy insurgents were able to pinpoint the helicopter’s exact location inside the compound, before destroying them all with mortars.