TNWiki Article Spotlight – Triangulation vulnerabilities exposed using Bing Maps API

Welcome to another Tuesday TNWiki Article Spotlight.

Back in the day, we used to sell unwanted items via the newspaper classified ad. This method was fairly anonymous as you only needed to reveal your address to any potential buyers.

Fast forward to today and selling stuff via the internet is now the method of choice. There are now multiple sites to list your products on (eBay, Craigslist, Gumtree, Facebook, etc.) but when we do, we may reveal more about ourselves than we intend.

In the TechNet Wiki article Warning to Social Media Users and Service Sellers - Your true location potentially exposed. Triangulation vulnerabilities, with examples, using Bing Maps API, we are shown by author and Microsoft MVP Pete Laker that we may expose our personal information to others.

Pete explains that by harvesting data from online classified websites that gather postal codes and other personal info, the Bing Maps API can triangulate the seller’s position. He shows us how to use a form of statistical quantization termed “binning” to achieve the triangulation.

With lots of code and examples, this article gets you started in pinpointing vulnerabilities with your own data.

by Ken Cenerelli (Twitter ,   Blog ,   MSDN Profile ,   MVP Profile)