Like your martinis shaken, not stirred? If you have dreams of joining James Bond in the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, you’d better know how to use a virtual private network. On Friday, the outgoing chief of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, announced a new dark web portal called Silent Courier that MI6 will use to recruit agents online. And if you want to use it, make sure you are familiar with VPNs.
Silent Courier marks MI6’s first attempt to use the dark web for recruitment. The government statement notes that the anonymity of the platform allows “anyone, anywhere in the world with access to sensitive information relating to terrorism or hostile intelligence activity to securely contact the UK and offer their services.”
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The statement goes on to specifically call out “potential new agents in Russia and around the world.”
Read more: Everything You Need to Know About VPNs and How They Work
MI6 will post instructions on how to access the recruitment portal on its verified YouTube channel, and advises those interested to “use trustworthy VPNs and devices not linked to themselves, to mitigate risks which exist in some countries.”
A VPN encrypts your internet traffic and masks your IP address, protecting knowledge of your physical location. So it makes sense that a Russian who’s dreaming of spying against his or her own country might not want to reveal where they’re located.
Read more: Being James Bond: How 007 movies got me into intelligence work
The US has tried something similar
The statement notes that MI6’s portal is similar to an approach taken by the US Central Intelligence Agency, which published social-media videos targeting potential Russian spies in 2023.
One such video, released in January 2024, tried to convince Russians who might be dissatisfied with Russia’s war in Ukraine to join the US side as a spy.
According to Reuters, in the video, a fictional employee of Russia’s military intelligence agency is presented as a patriot who loves Russia, but feels betrayed by corruption among the country’s leadership. In the video’s final shot, he is seen reaching out to the CIA from a mobile phone.
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