SAS hackers’ cover blown... by a job advert!
A JOB advertisement for the Ministry of Defence has inadvertently revealed the existence of an SAS hacker squad.
The £33,000-a-year role to work with the secretive Computer Network Operations Exploitation Unit was displayed earlier this month.
Based in Hereford, the role called for an ‘extraordinary talented electronics engineer’ [sic] to ‘work alongside some of the best scientists and engineers’ to deliver ‘solutions directly to the soldiers and officers of a unique and specialised military unit’.
The job advertisement, which has now been removed from the MoD website, described the unit as MAB5 – understood to be a codename for UK Special Forces tasked with hacking for the SAS.
A telephone number in the advert, uncovered by researcher Alan Turnbull, of the Secret Bases website, is for the SAS Barracks at Credenhill, Hereford, and the postcode links to the SAS’s Pontrilas training area.
It is also described as a ‘small military unit that specialises in the provision of novel and groundbreaking science and technology prototypes’ for military operations and mostly consists of ‘civil servants who are Defence’s most talented scientists and engineers’.
Working a 37-hour week, the new recruit is expected to provide SAS soldiers with ‘rapid solutions’ to give them an ‘operational advantage over their increasingly wide-ranging and technically advanced adversary’. The team is run by a lieutenant-colonel, who is named at the foot of the jobs page along with his email address.
The officer, originally a member of the Royal Corps of Signals, was commended in 2013 with a medal for outstanding service ‘within the Special Forces’.
The Pontrilas base in Herefordshire where the unit is located includes a 200-yard firing range dug into the hillside, a Boeing 747 for practising hostage crisis situations, as well as close-quarter combat training areas. Hundreds of pine trees were felled and thousands of tons of earth were excavated to make way for the site.
Part of the state-of-the-art complex was reportedly built underground to reduce the threat of an Al Qaeda attack – and to cut the noise caused by explosions and constant rifle fire during exercises.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: ‘We do not comment on Special Forces activity.’