The Denial of Service attack is an attack on a computer resource to render it unavailable to its intended users. Very often it is the work of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Recently ReputationDefender came across a news story where a man denied service to a would-be lover and was attacked, kind of a variation on the DoS attack.
It’s your typical boy-meets-girl-over-the-Internet-posing-as-a-woman-in-Second Life story, but with some zaniness thrown in for good measure. After meeting in first life (that is, real life), the 52-year-old male victim from Claymont, Delaware ended the relationship (virtual and otherwise). This apparently upset the real woman of the pair, but instead of resorting to the typical jaded Internet-lover tactics of weepy/angry blog posts and troll forum comments calling his manhood into question, she decided to get physical, and not in the Linda Ronstadt way.
In August the jilted woman allegedly drove to the victim’s workplace in Pennsylvania and attempted to kidnap him at gunpoint. When that initial attempt at reconciliation failed (we can’t understand why not), she returned undaunted two weeks later to track down the victim’s Delaware home address. Unfortunately for her, he had recently moved, so she did what any sane person would do: she posed as a postal worker and searched for four days until she found the new address.
A truly compassionate soul, the woman brought her dog Gogi along with her to Delaware and then cut and removed a screened window in order to enter her virtual ex’s apartment.
According to police, when our would-be beau arrived home on Thursday, August 21, he saw someone pointing an object at his chest that was projecting a laser beam. Recognizing that his apartment was not the location for an impromptu rave, he fled immediately and contacted the police.
Authorities soon arrived on the scene, only to discover that the dog Gogi had been bound with duct tape and put in the bathroom while the woman was nowhere to be found. In addition to the dog, she apparently left behind a pair of handcuffs, a roll of duct tape, a Taser and a BB gun.
Maryland authorities identified her vehicle approximately an hour after the incident at a rest stop on I-95. After a brief struggle she was taken into custody and now faces charges of attempted kidnapping, burglary and aggravated menacing.
The conclusion is one that we’ve brought up before, but it bears repeating: be careful with what you do on the Internet. It is a very short leap for a determined individual to go from cyber stalking to real world stalking. Both are very hurtful, scary and illegal, but at least you can’t get tased over email.
ReputationDefender encourages parents to educate their children about online safety and their online reputation. Any readers have online teen safety tips? Let us know in the comments!
ReputationDefender Blog recently posted about the cyber attacks that are taking place against websites associated with the former Russian republic of Georgia.
The interiors of the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have all been made curiously empty on the “map” function, erasing the whereabouts of towns, roads, cities, etc. This was not the case last week, and one can only assume that this move was done in response to the recent escalating conflicts in the region.
One of Google’s more popular slogans is “Don’t be evil.” A new one may turn out to be “Complete privacy does not exist.” ReputationDefender Blog recently ran into this interesting story about digital privacy and Google Street View.
Pennsylvania residents Aaron and Christine Boring filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against Google earlier this year because images of their home were published on the popular engine’s “Street View” mapping feature. Google has moved to dismiss, arguing that the couple:
live in a residential community in the twenty-first-century United States, where every step upon private property is not deemed by law to be an actionable trespass.
Google’s legal eagles go on to assert that
Today’s satellite-image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist. In any event, Plaintiffs live far from the desert and are far from hermits.
The photos, such as they are, do not reveal much of the Boring home (no pun intended), and appear to be from the couple’s driveway, which is allegedly a private road in its own right. Google’s motion notes that the company intends to prove that there was no sign designating the road as private. True to their first motto, Google has removed its “Street View” photos of the Boring residence after the couple filed its lawsuit.
There has been quite a bit of buzz in the Internet recently surrounding the actions a rookie New York City cop took during a Critical Mass ride through Times Square. A bystander caught the officer on tape body checking a bicyclist to the ground.
The Smoking Gun got in on the action and promptly posted the official report the officer submitted about the incident, much of which is in direct contradiction to the events caught on camera.
Judging from the sources, the outrage from many people stems from the fact that the attack on the bicyclist seems unprovoked and overly violent. People expect the NYPD to be more courteous, or at least not tackle cyclists in the street, it seems.The officer has been stripped of his badge and gun pending review, and is reportedly on desk duty for the foreseeable future. This all sounds fairly standard for a police force with proper internal controls. Now we wait for the hearing and justice to prevail, yes?Not on the Internet, they don’t. If there is one thing to take away from this incident, it is that the mob justice of the Internet is swift and brutal. There are websites now that are providing more information than the bicycle tackling cop would probably ever have wanted to find about himself online.
We won’t link to those sites, but a cursory overview of some of them reveals:
The Officer’s Badge Number
The Officer’s Age
The Officer’s Full Name
The Officer’s Family Information (father and mother’s names, careers)
Where the Officer Attended High School (and class year)
The Officer’s Home Address (with both street and map views)
The Officer’s Phone Number
The Officer’s Facebook Profile
The Officer’s Past Legal Issues
If you have any private information on the Internet you must understand that this can become (and already is, to some extent) public information. Anyone with relatively basic computer skills can dig up and repost information. They can even make stuff up, if they like, and they have a platform from which to disseminate their views. In this instance a police officer upset some people and his actions were caught on tape (we won’t wade into the arguments for/against justification, that’s not our job). Now he has very quickly learned how online information can be wielded to attain what the internet perceives as justice.
The New York Times is reporting today that 11 people have been charged with stealing over 40 million credit and debit card numbers in what is being called “the largest identity-theft case ever prosecuted by the Justice Department.”
The authorities said that the scheme was spearheaded by a Miami man named Albert Gonzalez, who hacked into the computer systems of retailers including TJX, BJ’s Wholesale Club , OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, Forever 21 and DSW Inc.
Although this scheme hacked into major retailers, web sites displaying personal information are another target for identity thieves. These sites often list sensitive and personal data online where thieves can exploit it. ReputationDefender offers MyPrivacy, a service that removes your private information from the web and functions as a Global Do Not Call List. Sign up for MyPrivacy today and keep your personal data off the internet for only $4.95/ month.
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Covering topics ranging from the Megan Meier MySpace suicide to the epilepsy foundation hack the article is a road map to internet cruelty and the real life faces behind flame wars and cyberbullying. The piece looks at some of the most notorious trolls and hackers online today and examines their motives and methods for gaining lulz. Some trolls even take their hijinx offline and send threatening messages to their victims in the real world. As a result of these death threats and harassing phone calls:
Several state legislators have recently proposed cyberbullying measures. At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any communications with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.”
[SNIP]
Many trolling practices, like prank-calling . . . and intimidat[ion], violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity.
ReputationDefender has looked at the legal difficulties surrounding internet harassment and online anonymous hate speech before and is committed to helping people lead safe, productive, online lives.
Besides the picture of MyReputation, there is not a lot of coherent copy to go on. To be clear, ReputationDefender and its management are certain that this article was a persuasive, concise, cogent and brilliantly argued piece of writing in its native language. Once the text was moved from Chinese to English though, it left us mildly puzzled. Here some highlights of the (mis)translated piece:
Besides made them to obtain good pouring out with the exchange, these behaviors also hatched each kind of organization, the association, the public relations website, the professionalism service, as well as new made money the way.
[SNIP]
This company chief executive officer Michael - Tike (Michael Fertik) said that because the lover bids good-bye the honorary question which initiates is they most often meets, “the people adopt enmity of the network incoming telegram sentiment.”
Facebook had planned to work on the “Friend Connect” product with Google, but now it seems they’ve mothballed it. A post from Facebook’s developer blog explained that they have ceased working on Google’s “Friend Connect” project because of a violation of internal terms of service.
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology, […] We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.
Of course, the first thing we thought when we read this was “You mean you didn’t take a look at the project before you partnered up?” I mean, you couldn’t spare one engineer for an hour or two to look at this?
Facebook’s chief privacy officer Chris Kelly shed some light on the matter when said in an interview with CNET News.com that his company never actually had a formal partnership with Google in Friend Connect. “There wasn’t participation to start with. That was sort of a mis-impression that may have been formed by their release,” he said. “We weren’t briefed on how the Friend Connect product was going to work.”
Interesting move. Facebook has always maintained that they are all about the privacy of their users, and this move seems to reinforce that. But the boys over at Google disagree with the argument put forth stating: “We think that Friend Connect at all steps puts users in control of their own data, at every step of the way, and we’re disappointed that Facebook disabled their users’ ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends.”
Both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times recently reported that a federal judge has ordered internet search giant Google to turn over the viewing records of YouTube as part of a billion dollar lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The records will reveal the usernames and IP addresses of every YouTube viewer since 2005 and while Viacom has stated that it will not use the data to go after individuals for copyright infringement, the ruling has privacy advocates concerned. Quoting from the New York Times:
“Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group.
[SNIP]
Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people.
The EFF responds in the LA Times, as well:
The group said the ruling would “allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube,” and it urged Viacom “to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”
Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, MTV, Paramount and other media channels, is concerned about losing revenue when clips from South Park or the Colbert Report are posted on video sharing sites. Both Viacom and Google say they are open to a compromise that does not reveal user IP addresses, but instead displays viewing trends through randomly assigned numbers.
It is clear that people are concerned about keeping their browsing habits anonymous.
ReputationDefender is committing to keeping private information off of the internet. MyPrivacy helps prevent your sensitive data from being revealed online.
There has been quite a bit of press about Online Reputation Management and how people are increasingly forming opinions based on what they find online.
The New York Post has a nice write up of ReputationDefender and the Online Reputation Management industry as a whole. Quoting from the piece:
“Whether you like it or not, your resume isn’t a piece of paper anymore. It’s your top 10 Google search results,” says Michael Fertik, CEO and founder of one such company, ReputationDefender.
[SNIP]
For fees ranging from 10 bucks for a credit-check-like comprehensive Web search to a $2,000 monthly charge for a full-frontal assault on demeaning content, reputation managers generally use two strategies: they either try to eliminate content altogether or conceal it in the bowels of a search engine’s results.
[Michael] Fertik’s firm will attempt to persuade owners of Web pages to remove humiliating posts or pictures for $30 per item. They use a process that tracks down Web hosts and contacts them in a “non-threatening” manner. The system works “nicely,” he says.
Now you can employ the services, for a fee, of course, of businesses that will keep an eye on your online reputation and help you keep it clean. One of the pioneers in this field, ReputationDefender, goes on a search-and-destroy mission. This organization scours the Internet to dig up every bit of information on you and then sets out to destroy (at your request) any negative information by getting it corrected or removed, whenever possible.
Sautter and Crompton encourage people — whether they’re job searching or not — to remember that everything they do online leaves a digital footprint. It’s up to each individual to determine whether those footprints take a step in the right — or wrong — direction in cyberspace.
And finally, Boston.com recently ran a piece that looked at the potential pitfalls that doctors face online. The article points out that while there are many safeguards in place to protect patient data, many doctors are exposed on the web.
“There may be slanderous information about a physician on the Web, published in a blog or on a Web page, by a vengeful patient, colleague, or ex-lover,” Dr. Tristan Gorrindo and Dr. James E. Groves write in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Equally vexing, there may be slanderous information published about someone with the same name as an unlucky physician.”
Medical professionals as well as other executives are urged to be proactive in claiming their webutation and controlling what people find when they are searched.
In response to the rash of false identities on MySpace, the company has requested users to send a video to admins of the real users saying their MySpace ID tag.
An ingenious YouTube user has taken this as an opportunity to compile the many faces of MySpace (which are predominantly young girls with bangs and lots of eye shadow). Enjoy!
ReputationDefender came across a great article in the New York Times today entitled “When Googling a Person (or Yourself) Isn’t Enough” that profiles the “Deep Web.” The Deep Internet, or DarkNet, consists of personal information that exists online that does not appear on a standard Google search.
The article covers a new site, Pipl.com, that delves into the deep internet to return a more complete picture of your digital footprint. Pipl scours white papers, government records and social networking sites of the deep internet in order to give people an accurate account of their online reputation.
ReputationDefender consistently searches beyond Google and queries the Deep Web for our customers in order to accurately portray their online reputation. As we move into the digital age, managing your online data, even data in the “deep internet,” will be a concern for responsible netizens the world over. ReputationDefender is committed to Internet Privacy, Identity Management and helping people become anonymous online.
Stephen Colbert, the popular cable talk show host, may want to add Internet Identity Theft to the list of threats facing America. If he does so, he will be speaking from experience.
Recently, Stephen Colbert began tweeting on his twitter account, and in the process, gave a shout out to diggnation. The post documenting this immediately shot to the top of Digg, gaining over 3,100 diggs.
Digg, Comedy Central and Colbert should get credit for quickly resolving the identity crisis. Given the fluid nature of internet identity, talk show hosts and everyday people alike have an interest in keeping tabs on their digital moniker.
A story about ReputationDefender and the continual development of our MyPrivacy product made the front page of Digg this morning. If you want to keep your personally identifiable information off the Internet, you need to read the story about ReputationDefender in Forbes. Check out the Digg screen cap below:
image via laughing squid.
