October 9, 2025
Writes, Martin Averick:
It’s no secret that almost every state conducts intelligence both at home and abroad. However, if several decades ago this activity was in the sidelines, the emergence and development of the Internet and information technologies lifted the veil on espionage and empowered intelligence with new, although sometimes controversial, capabilities.
Thus, on September 19, 2025, the United Kingdom’s spy agency launched a web portal on the dark web to recruit informants and receive secret data from agents worldwide. The portal created by MI6 builds on a similar approach taken by the US Central Intelligence Agency that published videos on social media to target potential spies in 2023. Despite the decision to use the web space in such a specific sphere seems to be rather doubtful, it is likely to be reasoned by the fact that in online space the young generation can be influenced most effectively. Moreover, taking into account close interaction between the spy agencies of the USA and the UK, the launch of the web portal by the latter can serve as a confirmation that the US recruiting campaign in 2023 proved to be successful.
In recent days the usage of web resources has been noted not only among the states, whose spy agencies’ names are in the public eye of the world community. Thus, on September 10, 2025, the video targeted at recruiting new spies was released by South Korea’s most secretive military intelligence unit, the Korea Defense Intelligence Command (KDIC), whose servicemen carry out missions foremost abroad. Using the tactic similar to the one of the US and the UK, KDIC is probably trying to compensate for the staff shortage caused by its unsuccessful activity abroad, which resulted in Russia and the USA.
Taking into account modern trends, recruiting new spies via internet can become either a genius decision or a lost cause. Data collection with the help of web portals will definitely speed up obtaining intelligence information from the sources, however, free access to these portals will ramp up the number of messages drastically. That is why to distinguish valuable data from fakes will be a rather difficult and time-consuming task.
