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WHO'S WATCHING YOU TODAY? published in Lebanon Daily Record January 10, 2015

Computers that started up on their own in the wee hours of the
morning.  The sounds of microprocessors interrupting your sleep from a
laptop which was shut down earlier in the evening.  A home phone that
connects somewhere else when you call it from work but no one is
there.  The trouble light on your alarm system  that chirps in the
middle of the night but there’s no identifiable cause.  A television
set that mysteriously begins to mute and the frames freeze and when
your provider technician does trouble-shooting on it, he finds nothing
wrong.

These are only a few of the red flags that began to alert former CBS
investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson back in 2011 that someone was
watching her.

This is an ongoing investigation with Attkisson even as I write today.
She sued the Department of Justice this week on allegations that the
Obama Administration through the DOJ had hacked into her computers
when she was reporting on Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and Obamacare.

The complete story as told in her book “Stonewalled - My Fight For
Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation and Harassment
in Obama’s Washington”  is not the focus of today’s column, although I
am sure I will be sharing that story with you on down the road
sometime.

But I wanted to get your attention on a privacy issue that has become
extremely pervasive throughout the country.  In fact it is the “cause”
which was taken up by Cassidy Wolf just weeks after she was crowned
Miss Teen USA in August of 2013 when she revealed to the world that
she had been a victim of cyber crime for over a year before she won
the crown.

It was about four months prior to her winning the beauty pageant that
she received an anonymous e-mail containing nude photos of herself
taken while she was changing clothes in her bedroom, and a demand from
the sender that she provide him with better photos, a sex video, and a
sex show on Skype, or he would leak the photos to the public, which
would ruin her chances for becoming Miss Teen USA.

Cassidy immediately called her mother, who contacted the FBI.  The FBI
took over the case, and subsequently arrested Jacob James Abrahams who
had been a classmate of Miss Wolf.  She did not know him from high
school because it was a large campus so she had no reason to suspect
him.

Further investigation revealed that Abrahams had spent the last year
spying on the young woman in her bedroom using a malware application
he had put on her computer by hacking into it.  He confessed to
breaking into the computers of 100 to 150 more young women that year.

Miss Wolf decided to come forward about the hacking incident to warn
others that this can happen to anyone.  She speaks to high schools and
other groups about the threat of “sextortion” which is the term for
trying to extort sexual favors from someone after obtaining photos or
videos by hacking into their computer.

She warns young women to be careful online, to change passwords
frequently, to delete browsing history and to place a sticker over
their computer’s webcam when it is not being used.  And most
important, to tell someone immediately, either your parents or law
enforcement authorities, if you feel your privacy has been violated.

A hacker in Texas gained remote control of a baby monitor being used
in the family nursery and spied on and yelled obscenities at a two
year old girl in her crib calling her by name because he read the
letters of her name painted on the nursery wall.  When the parents
came into the room he focused the camera directly on them using his
remote and began to curse  them as well.

Matthew Anderson of Banffshire, Scotland, a 36 year old father of 5
was jailed for 18 months after he was found guilty of infecting more
than 200,000 computers with a virus so he could hack into the webcams
of young women, including girls as young as 16.

And this brings up another important fact we all need to be aware of.
There are no national boundaries in this matter of computer hacking by
predators or those wishing to steal your identity.  The internet is
available everywhere and the predator and victim may actually be
thousands of miles apart, but this is no consolation to the fact that
someone is watching and recording your every move.

This type of hacking, referred to as “ratting”  is a very profitable
“business” as the hackers buy and sell information about victims,
usually young women or children,  whose computers have been infected
with a virus placed there by the hackers themselves. They trick the
victim into downloading a piece of software on their computer by
sending an email link which may appear to be as innocent as a nice
picture, or music, or even diet tips or celebrity stories.

As outlined in an article written by Radhika Sanghani in The
Telegraph, when the victim clicks on the link it installs the Remote
Administration Tool (RAT, hence the term “ratting”) and the hackers
can take control of the computer.   Once they have gained control of
the victim’s computer, they can watch everything the victim does on or
in the vicinity of the computer’s webcam from their own home
computers.

They can also get into the victim’s hard drive and access personal and
family photos and any personal files that have been saved to the
victim’s computer.

Parents need to be aware that even if their children are careful not
to talk to strangers over the internet and take every other
precaution, their children are still not safe from this type of crime.
That piece of tape over the camera lens on their computer may be the
best insurance you can buy.

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