Can you imagine your life without the use of the internet or cellphone? Probably not! Emails and other electronic devices have become such critical vehicles for communicating and doing business that it is hard to imagine how we ever lived without them. Unfortunately, as great as the internet and other electronic devices may be, they have also become vehicles for scams, viruses and more recently in the workplace, a tool used by employees to engage in character assassination of each other via social networks, online harassment and cyberstalking.
Last week I sat in horror and listened as one of my international clients relayed a story that was so mind blowing, I felt like I was watching a cloak and dagger espionage movie! Obviously the story is too long to relay in this forum but here is the abridged version. My client was a victim of email spoofing! Exactly! I didn’t know what is was either but apparently email spoofing “is the forgery of an e-mail header so that the message appears to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the actual source.” In other words someone could send an email pretending to be you and the receiver would have no reason to believe that it was not you because the sender would be using your email address! Yep it could happen! Needless to say my client was in the hot seat and almost lost her job when she was confronted by the President of the company for supposedly sending mass emails to the entire staff highlighting the fact that he was “clueless, incompetent, lacked vision and was running the company to the ground.” Luckily for my client someone in the IT department decided to run a trace on the IP address of the email and was able to track it to its real sender – a disgruntled employee who was recently demoted – go figure!
Having been a victim of online harassment and cyberstalking myself recently, (and for those of you who may not know what cyberstalking is, Ladies and gentlemen “Cyberstalking is the use of the Internet or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual, a group of individuals, or an organization. It may include false accusations, monitoring, making threats, identity theft, damage to data or equipment, the solicitation of minors for sex, or gathering information in order to harass. The definition of "harassment" must meet the criterion that a reasonable person, in possession of the same information, would regard it as sufficient to cause another reasonable person distress.” Wikipedia)
I knew exactly what my client was going through and how quickly these so called “I was only joking, I didn’t mean anything by it, somebody needed to tell him or her what was going on, somebody needed to expose him or her, I wanted to express my love (feel free to add any other twisted reason here) could escalate out of control.
So this week I interviewed Royal Bahamas Police Force Cyber Crimes guru, Sargent Dale Strachan, to shed some light on this growing problem. Here is what he had to say:
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