When It's Someone You Trust...

You never know who might try to hurt you on the internet

BY CATHERINE WALKER

OVER the past few weeks we have learned that 80 per cent of victims of cyber-stalking are women, and many have been the victims of ex-lovers, but although it seems relationships have a lot to do with online stalking it is not always men who are the stalkers. This week, we talk to a woman who was stabbed in the back by the person who she least expected.

Jane Burns (name has been changed to protect identity) was a normal young woman. In 2005, most of her friends at university were studying abroad, which brought her and another classmate a lot closer together than before. They spent hours together and told each other everything. Jane’s new best friend spent a lot of time on the internet, trying to meet men in forums. Jane worried her friend because she would often go to meet them after just a few weeks, thinking she had found her ideal man, and then resulting in disappointment, but little did Jane know it was herself she should worry about. Jane was in a long-distance relationship with a man abroad, but thanks to the internet they kept in touch every day.

One day, after she returned from a holiday at her boyfriend’s home, she went online and found an e-mail, apparently from him, which was directed to another woman, telling her he loved and missed her. Jane, with tears in her eyes, contacted her boyfriend to ask for an explanation. He, of course, knew nothing, but she felt deceived and hurt and told him she wanted to split up. Luckily, he insisted she checked whether the e-mail had really come from his address – it hadn’t. The address that had been used was the same, apart from a dash, which in the heat of the moment, she hadn’t noticed. On closer examination, the language was a little different, although the nickname used for her was right.

The only person who had this information was Jane’s friend, who also happened to have asked to read some of their e-mails just two weeks earlier. Why did she do this? Jane says she can’t imagine. But when she told her friend about the ordeal, without accusing her, she immediately went offline and the two have not spoken since.

You never know who is trying to hurt you on the internet, so be careful.

original article found here

Trust turning to betrayal.

10 CLUES OF AN ONLINE AFFAIR

by Bill Mitchell

1. Your spouse/ partner spends excess time online. Who doesn’t use a computer today? I know a few people. They are excellent for paying bills, staying in touch with family, friends, customers, finding street locations, and a host of other productive endeavors. We can not live without them and shutter when a lighting storm threaten our usage. Just look at kids and their instant messaging. They will go without dinner just to keep in touch with their circle of friends. Try to pull them away, it’s no easy task. Does your spouse resemble your kid’s magnetism to the computer? Discover why this need is so powerful before it’s too late.

2. Passwords, instant message “buddy lists”, internet email accounts and emails are concealed - even protected from you! Do you find your spouse needing his “own space” at the computer? Is there a real reluctance when you ask to know his passwords? What’s there to hide? These questions all have obvious answers. The act of hiding information is deceptive by nature. Of course, those of us who have worked in “Corporate America” understand the need to protect company secrets. But what legitimate “family secret” are we hiding? Listen, any time a spouse becomes secretive with you, it fulfills a direct need they demonstrate. Why? You are like the judge, referee, or source of authority creating that “sense of accountability” over them. Furthermore, they are breaking matrimonial law if committing adultery. There is, in many courts, a price to pay!

3. Computer use after you have gone to bed, when you fall asleep or in the middle of the night. Have you been awaken by the absence of your spouse at night and found him at the computer? If this behavior becomes a pattern you certainly need to be concerned. While work demands a sense of commitment and loyalty, working late repeatedly after you have fallen asleep is a little odd.

4. Your partner abruptly shuts off the internet and/or computer when you approach. This is panic and unexplainable behavior. The rationalization is “when all other contingency plans fail, just shut that thing off and don’t get caught.” This foolish act is also called a “computer crash” and has the potential of damaging both hardware and software. The loss of files occurs when a computer is cut off abruptly. Many spouses have reported this behavior just prior to hiring us. We consider it a significant indicator of a deviant behavior. Now, bear in mind your spouse may be viewing pornography and fear reprisal. This may explain the need for panic.

5. The computer and monitor are always positioned away from your sight. The study of body language has become useful to many investigators, especially those of us who administer lie detection examinations. An obvious sign of deception and a common mistake the cheater make is blocking your view. They need the time to clear a screen, turn off the monitor, or change to another internet page when threatened with exposure. Intentionally turning the monitor or laptop away from view is an indicator they don’t want you to see something. Over time this act develops into a habit and confers greater freedom from detection. In most instances, having the lead time to hide the truth from you is all they need.

6. Clears all internet history after chat sessions, usage or installs software to automatically rid this information. There are times when a computer becomes filled with unwanted files. Computers run faster when less “temporary” files use up valuable “ram memory.” This is prudent maintenance for any computer user. What I am referring to in this sign is the repeated habit of purposefully clearing information from discovery. While this information is retrievable through the science of Computer Forensics and Google Cache holds a lot of things people think they've deleted, you won’t find it readily available. On the market now is software that actually helps the cheater. The actual purpose of this new software tool is to hide any trace of computer internet usage. Do you find this a little suspicious? I do.

7. Exhibits a compulsive need to be online and seems defensive when confronted to stop. “When are you coming to bed?” “We really need to go, now, what’s taking so long?” “Can’t you do that later?” Have you asked these types of questions? Teenagers often become “obsessed” with instant messaging. If you have kids who use the computer, you know. They have trouble walking away from the PC. This same desire or need displayed by your spouse is cause for alarm. A compulsive, defensive pattern of behavior shows a strong need to continue. You need to know why.

8. Shares personal information, photos or events with people who are strangers to you in emails, chatrooms or while instant messaging. Setting up a profile for instant messaging is commonplace. Kids love to fill them up and share with friends on the buddy list. I’ve witnessed spouses who send nude pictures of themselves over the internet. They share very personal information that should be reserved to the marital home. Maybe it’s time to track this information with software that collects this data. Today more courts are allowing emails and computer usage data as evidence. It’s advisable to consult an attorney in your state beforehand!

9. Plays online games and frequents "personals" chatrooms. This is where it starts. Play a few games, win or loss but then we need to chat. Well if chatting is fine, why not include your spouse? You can’t, so why do it?

10. Exhibits the eight warning signs illustrated in "The More You Know – Getting the evidence and support you need to investigate a troubled relationship"

Thirty plus years of investigative experience is poured into this new release. It’s a “must have” resource guide for every woman’s personal library.

2005 Bill Mitchell All rights reserved.

In Just One Hour Online...

It took just one hour for internet experts to find out almost every private detail of one woman's life

Steve Boggan challenged web experts to see how much they could discover about his partner. The results were chilling...

As I sit writing this, I am feeling vaguely grubby — guilty even — in the way a neurotic husband might after hiring a gumshoe to go trawling through his wife’s secrets.

There is a 15-page report in front of me chronicling virtually every aspect of my girlfriend’s life: past and present. That includes her friends, education, embarrassing pictures, former boyfriends and long-forgotten relatives.

Much of the information is new to me. And the uses to which it could be put — uses I hadn’t dreamt of until this week — are chilling.

Armed with this information, criminals could use her identity to commit fraud or resurrect minute details of her past, her movements and friendships to lure her into scams or even dangerous liaisons.

It could be used to con her into revealing her bank details and credit card numbers.

My internet snooping began because the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt — a man not known for worrying about internet surfers’ privacy — suggested recently that young people might want to change their identities in the future in order to separate themselves from a past lived too openly on the internet.

We all know Facebook pictures of you dancing at a party with a traffic cone on your head might come back to haunt you. But change your identity completely?

Surely, I wondered, there isn’t enough out there to warrant that.

So I decided to find out how much I could discover about my partner of 12 years, Suzanne, just by using the internet.

Before you think I’m a rat, I should point out that Suzanne, a 39-year-old with a soft furnishings business, agreed to it.

I began in the way lots of identity thieves do: with her name and address. Of course, I knew these details, but identity thieves often discover them by ‘dumpster diving’: looking through dustbins for a discarded piece of mail.

I passed Suzanne’s name and address — but no other details — to Adam Laurie, a 48-year-old computer security and internet privacy advocate.

He shared the information with Chris Sumner, 39, another security expert, who works for a multi-national corporation.

Or at least, that is Sumner’s day job; by night, he analyses vast amounts of information publicly available on the internet to see what it can tell him about criminal activity — in this case, how fraudsters are using social networking sites to choose their victims.

Using sophisticated and completely legal computer techniques, he looks for patterns in the behaviour of internet users to uncover otherwise hidden links.

In the case of social networking sites, he can see just how close two people, or groups of people, really are to each other.

He had met neither me nor Suzanne and knew nothing of her existence until given her name and address.

A day later, his findings dropped into my email inbox.

Picking Suzanne’s life apart, he told me, had taken him just over an hour.

This is because, in common with millions of people in Britain, Suzanne uses the social networking sites Facebook and Friends Reunited, and has signed up to the business networking site LinkedIn and Flickr, the photo-sharing website.

By also using the genealogy website ancestry.co.uk, Sumner was able to piece together the names of all but one of Suzanne’s relatives, including cousins.

Using electoral rolls on 192.com and by searching on Google, he found the addresses of her parents and lots of her friends and colleagues.

From her LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, he found the names of Suzanne’s primary and secondary schools, and a college she had attended in Derby. He also discovered she had studied fine art at Central St Martin’s College of Art & Design in London.

He also had details of Suzanne’s qualifications and pictures of her from her days at school. The snaps weren’t hers — an old schoolfriend had put them on Facebook.

There were some naff hairstyles, but that was as deep as the embarrassment went. Only you know whether a trawl of pictures of you would be more damaging.

But Sumner didn’t stop there. He was able to tell me that Suzanne had travelled extensively in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific.

This was because she had used an application on Facebook that linked to the travel website TripAdvisor. You fill in where in the world you have been to keep your relatives up to date. But anyone can see it.

He was not only able to list all 41 countries she had visited, but also the 162 towns and islands to which she had been.

Sumner was able to tell me Suzanne’s exact movements by cross-referencing her TripAdvisor entries with photographs she had posted on Flickr.

When you click on a picture on Flickr, a small box gives you access to detailed information that is entered not by you, but by your camera. So, the date and time of the shot are included.

Now that phones and cameras have GPS, there are even concerns that the location of where you uploaded the picture — normally where you live — might be visible.

From a mixture of all of these websites, Sumner listed Suzanne’s likes, dislikes, hobbies, the 34 towns and cities she had visited in Britain, the places where she used to socialise in her youth and details of her former jobs in the newspaper industry.

In fact, it’s fair to say that after just one hour’s trawling he knew more about many aspects of my girlfriend’s past than I did.

Shocking? Perhaps. Yet also astonishingly easy. Suzanne had voluntarily signed up to these websites and, bit by bit, put most of this information out there herself — and forgotten much of it.

However, what I found even more disturbing is that much of what Sumner found was supposed to have been visible only to people whom Suzanne had accepted into her inner circle of ‘friends’ on each networking website. This turned out to be dangerously naive.

Over the years, standard privacy settings— notably for Facebook — have changed, so what you once thought was private has become public.

You are notified about these changes, but if you forget to adjust your individual settings to return to the old level of privacy (which can be fiendishly complicated) then some of your private information becomes available for everyone to see.

‘There are some weird, strange quirks that let you into places you aren’t supposed
to go,’ says Sumner.

‘For example, on Facebook you may not be allowed to see someone’s photographs because they’re private. But if they post a message with one of their photos attached, you are given the option of seeing their whole album. And as you can imagine, that can be embarrassing.’

According to Sumner and Laurie, organised criminals are using this information
in increasingly sophisticated ways to target victims.

‘Criminal gangs are carefully fishing for victims,’ says Laurie. ‘In the past, they would have sent out thousands and thousands of spam emails in a scattergun fashion — and many still do.

‘These are called phishing scams and involve fake requests from banks asking
people to confirm their account details, passwords and so on. The hope is that, once in a while, someone would be silly enough to reply.

‘Today, they are much more targeted. For example, with the information we got about Suzanne from Flickr, you would be able to see where she visited, when, and, if there were captions on the pictures, with whom.

‘After that, the criminals (or romance scammers) would tailor a scam. If they noticed that, say, she was a regular visitor to Malawi, they would make an introduction online, claiming they were a friend — for example, called Dave — of someone she visited there with five years ago.

‘Surely she remembers them? From that beach — her friend was there, too ... yes?

‘Usually people are too embarrassed to say they don’t remember. Then ‘‘Dave’’ claims he is setting up an orphanage — would she like to make a contribution towards it?

‘Or they might simply say they’re a friend of a person you were with and say he’s gone back there, broken his leg and they’re having a fund-raising collection to airlift him home. It’s crude, but effective.’

Sumner says it can get even more complex, with software tools that can work out who is friends with whom among your online groups of contacts.

‘Once you have established a person’s inner network, you go back into their history to find someone they knew at school who isn’t in that network of close friends and who hasn’t signed up to networking sites,’ he says.

‘Then you join those sites in their name, establish yourself with their online identity and ask your original target to accept you as a friend on, say, Facebook.

‘Before you know it, you are inside their life as a trusted person they think they used to know.

‘Once you are in, you can read about what your target and their friends are up to, such as when they are going on holiday. With that information, you can burgle their homes.

‘You can even ask to be Facebook friends with their children. This is a particularly frightening way for someone to stalk you or your family. They can introduce themselves as a Facebook friend of Mum or Dad. And then it’s only a couple of steps away from something awful happening.

‘Teenagers, in particular, are very indiscreet and post hundreds of pictures of themselves, sometimes drunk with their friends in the living room in front of the plasma screen TV or home cinema.

‘Not only are these the sort of pictures that will come back to haunt them in the future — potential employers aren’t supposed to look at these, but they do — but it’s also a dumb way to show burglars what property you have and where it is.

‘Especially after your children have told all their “friends” when the house is going to be empty.’

Sumner described how some of the information he gained from Suzanne would have helped him to get hold of her bank and credit card details. I won’t reveal exactly how he did it, but it involved using some of her social networking information to gain her confidence, then posing as a friend and asking if her business would make some curtains for him with a sample of material he’d seen on another website.

The catch would be that he had set up that other website himself and when she visited it some rudimentary programming he had installed would help him acquire her credit card details.

I ask Suzanne if she would have fallen for the scam. ‘It’s hard to know, but based on what he said, why wouldn’t I have gone along with the requests of a potential customer?’ she says.

There are other ways, too, that criminals can use personal information harvested from the internet. For example, people often use the names of their children or
pets as passwords for online shopping sites.

If criminals can find these names, by gaining access to your social networking circle, they can try to hack into your accounts on popular shopping sites such as Amazon and view your shopping history, or even order expensive goods to be sent to a pick-up address. (I did not ask Laurie or Sumner to attempt this because it would be in breach of data protection law.)

What can we do about all this? Well, not a lot, other than to be aware your information can be used in more sinister ways than you can possibly imagine, and to be on your guard.

As for your children, they can be warned to modify their behaviour and to think twice about what they write and post online and whom they accept as ‘friends’.

According to Linda Weatherhead, principal policy advocate for the campaign group Consumer Focus, social networking sites bear much responsibility for this explosion of potentially useful information.

‘It is a complex problem, but one simple way of making things safer would be to have all our information kept private as the default setting,’ she says. ‘Then it would be up to you how much you want to relax them as you decide to share more of your private
information.

‘Beyond that, we just have to be careful what we put out there — you can advise children about what they are doing, but you can’t wrap them in cotton wool. You can never make anything completely safe.’

But if Adam Laurie and Chris Sumner are right, then the risks of social networking extend far beyond a few embarrassing photos.

In particular, be careful who your ‘friends’ are; they could turn out to be your worst enemies.

original article here

Private or Public Communication?

By Doug Lacombe

(CANADA) Attendees at my social media seminars often ask how to keep business and personal separate in social media.

The older they are, the more likely that question comes up. It's generational angst on the death of privacy. They seem unaware that privacy is virtually dead already.

The only privacy filter you can trust is the one in your head. If you don't want something on the web, on the news or spread around the office, don't say or share it. No amount of reassurance will convince me Facebook or any other social network has the privacy settings right. As a result, I assume everything I say and do on the Internet is on the public record.

This collision of the private and public is causing some consternation in the workplace.

The International Bar Association (ibamedialaw.wordpress.com) recently blogged: "Experts have stated that 'the intersection of social media and the office is a potential minefield," creating numerous possibilities for a wide variety of lawsuits. A manager 'poking' an employee on Facebook might give rise to a sexual harassment claim. Or perhaps an employer may rescind a job offer to an employee after learning via Facebook that the applicant is of a particular religion or sexual orientation."

Granted this is the litigious U.S.A. we're talking about here, but it's true in Canada, too. A little over a year ago I served as an expert witness in a case where a group of workers who harassed a co-worker, both in person and on Facebook, were fired. They claimed their communications on Facebook were private. I was able to dispel that myth, leading to the case being settled. In that case the employer prevailed, but in the absence of case law, that's increasingly uncertain.

original post here

Online Harassment Getting Serious Legal Attention

2 Chicago men are charged in separate cases of online harassment
by Steve Schmadekeb

A Chicago man accused of posting a fake Craigslist ad that said his sister was giving away all her possessions is facing misdemeanor charges after bargain-hunters descended on the woman's Joliet home looking to cart away her belongings.

And a married Chicago computer consultant is being accused of posting nude photos of his California ex-girlfriend having intercourse on two Web sites, as well as posting the woman's phone number and the home addresses of her and her mother.

The unrelated incidents are examples of cases that prosecutors are bringing against people who allegedly use the Internet to harass someone.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE