Expert in Email Tracing Can Use IP Trace to Stop Internet Scams

Internet scams...we've all heard of them happening, and some of us have even been had by one or two. The simple fact remains that they do exist, and it seems that the masterminds behind them aren't getting tired nor are they slowing down anytime soon. So, we have to rely on the experts to catch them, the ones who specialize in email tracing.

A private investigator who is an expert in email tracing is able to use an IP trace to pinpoint the source of an internet scam. All that is needed is one single email that was sent from the internet scam site. The email will be stripped and the header extracted for thorough investigation.

Normally, an email trace will be performed to pull any personal details about the sender of the email, such as the full name, address and phone number when available. The ISP of the culprit is also determined, and can be used immediately to file an abuse report and at least temporarily stop the internet scam from continuing.

To take things a step further, a private investigator will also do an IP trace to determine the location from which the email was sent. So, if the scam artist is operating out of his home or somewhere else, you should be able to find out. Also, most experts will perform a header comparison to check for signs of previous related incidents. With a list of possible suspects on hand, it should be fairly easy for a private investigator to close in on the persons responsible...they will either rule out names or single them out for further investigation.

Email tracing can be a great time saver, especially when you have a first encounter with an internet scam. Most of these scam artists hide themselves so well that it's nearly impossible for you to be able to give any information about them and it actually lead authorities to them. So, you get a private investigator to do a little digging first.

You could certainly take on the task of doing these things yourself, using the free tools online. But, you won't get the results you want or need. You can attempt to find the identity of the person sending you the scam emails with a free email lookup, but you're not likely to get their real name. You can also use the IP lookup tools available and trace the IP from which the email was sent. Chances are this is going to give you a dead end too, only turning up the ISP and the location from which the IP was issued. Neither of these results will do you any good in putting an end to internet scams, and these scam artists are well aware of the fact.

The are many private investigators available to lend their services to you, but you must be sure they are an expert. More importantly, they should be an expert in email tracing and have experience with internet scams.

Ed Opperman, President of Opperman Investigations, is an expert in IP address tracing and has over 10 years experience in online investigations. For more information, visit http://www.emailrevealer.com now!

How to Surf Securely With Anonymous Proxy Surfing

Any semblance of privacy we used to have on the internet is long gone, anonymous proxy surfing is becoming more common as people realise just how much of their personal data exists online. Do you have to be a technical wizard to protect your privacy online, well if you want to do it for free it definitely helps?

What are the Issues in Surfing Securely

The main areas of concern are usually the following:

• ISP Logs which contain your IP address and every web site you visit.
• Web Server Logs - which record your IP address
• HTTP Transport - unfortunately the majority of web traffic is in plain text so can be intercepted and read easily.

So whats the Solution and will it cost me?

You can protect yourself to varying extents by using paid or free technology. The easiest part to protect yourself against is the Web server logs, if you use anonymous proxy surfing your IP address will not be recorded in the web servers you visit. Setting up a proxy server manually is quite simple in IE you will find it in Tools/Internet Options/Connections/LAN Settings - just input the address of the anonymous proxy and that's it. The problem is finding a free proxy to use as the majority are hacked or misconfigured servers and are nearly always painfully slow.

You can also use an Open source program called TOR which is more secure than selecting a random anonymous proxy and hoping it's not run by a Russian Hacking Club! TOR has the potential to be extremely secure but it is fairly difficult to set up and again can be extremely slow browsing using it unless you stick to text only sites.

To deal with the other points you'll need to use some sort of encryption protocol, try looking at Stunnel which enables you to encrypt TCP connections inside SSL (Secure Socket Layer). Again it's free but you'll need to pretty technical to get it all working, it's quite fun experimenting though if you have the inclination and time.

If you want to read about some of my thoughts on using free anonymous proxies and how you can surf without being spied on, try the link below, from there you can also try out a demo of the most secure, sophisticated anonymous web browsing product available anywhere.

Try the new free demo of Identity Cloaker on the link below.

Anonymous Surfing Demo

Take care and stay safe.
Jim

Secure Surfing Using Free Anonymous Proxies

The credit crunch is hitting hard, the world financial institutions are in turmoil but one thing stays the same, people still delude themselves that they can protect themselves online using free anonymous proxies.

If you wanted to find a list of the most hacked, insecure and badly administered servers you'd find a pretty good candidate on the many free anonymous proxies lists that float around on the internet. It's true, a server usually gets on these lists by either being hacked, set up badly or deliberately set up to steal peoples personal information. Virtually none of these servers are set up on purpose to allow anonymous surfing, the only ones that are have identity thieves sitting on them running sniffers and installing various malware on the clients that connect.

You'd have to be crazy to send all your personal data, all your browsing via one of these servers unless you knew who was running it and why. Yet people do it all the time, find a list on the internet - read some line like -

{Ip Address } - Highly Secure Anonymous Proxy - Russia

Then send all their internet traffic via this one server, so just let me spell it out what that line probably really means

{Ip Address } - Insecure Hacked Server - Run by Russian Identity thieves

It's fantastic news for the hackers, instead of trying to intercept traffic, send phishing emails or bombard clients with malware to steal identities. All they have to do is load up a hacked server with a network sniffer, install lots of nasty trojans and viruses and perform the final act - install a simple proxy server and wait. Pretty soon network scans will pick up this open proxy server and it will appear in the lists, after that there will be a mad scramble as people send all their data down this 'anonymous proxy' . It's about as far from secure surfing as you can possibly get!

If you want to read about some of my thoughts on using free anonymous proxies and how you can surf without being spied on, try the link below, from there you can also try out a demo of the most secure, sophisticated web browsing product available anywhere.

Try the new trial of Identity Cloaker on the links below.

Online Surf Protection

Anonymous Surfing

Take care and stay safe.
Jim

How to Protect Your Kid's Email Accounts

Making sure that your kids' online communications are safe is not an entirely easy process. It takes patience, effort, and diligence. You need to begin by keeping your children educated regarding safe practices when communicating online whether via email or otherwise. But that is only the start. Even the most informed child is prone to making the wrong choices just from a lack of life experience and from innocence to the intentions of others. Children simply feel that they are invincible and no amount of warning will change that.

It's not that you want to instill a fear of the internet or of people into your children, but a serious level of caution is highly recommended. To backup this sense, it is advised that you always supervise the online activities of your children. It is something that should be taken very seriously, and at least until your child has reached into their teenage years, it is appropriate for you to limit the amount of time that your child is allowed online and that you should oversee any of his or her activities while there.

You will also likely want to invest in a parental guarding program to install into your computer that will block out sites that have a certain rating, and will let you have greater control over where your children can and cannot go on the world wide web, and will give you an accurate history of where they have gone and what they have done there.

Be sure that your child is well aware that he or she should never share any of his or her private and contact information with anyone or any site online unless you give your specific permission. You may want to look into any email addresses with which your child wishes to communicate, using a free email search. This lets you enter the address into a lookup field so that you can find out what other data has been registered to it such as a name and address or a company's info. This will help you to make your decision as to whether or not it is safe to use.

Online Personal Investigation

If you have lost touch with old classmates or work colleagues, you may want to know how to contact them. Maybe you have to search through the phone book and found that many people with the same last name and initials as your friend. Maybe they have been married, you no longer know their names. If this is the case, then you may be pleased to know that you can search online and do a little bit of personal investigation.

Hiring a private detective appears to be a bit serious, all you want to do is find an old friend or companion. You just want to know their name and address please? You do not really want to further their personal life and to find information, will prove uncomfortable, such as criminal records or bankruptcy cases. If you want to find a little information about someone, then hiring a private detective is possible not the best option for you. However, if the person has assumed a new identity, either in a criminal sense or maybe as witness protection, then your investigations may have to delve slightly further. Either way, you do not need to resort to a private detective. Online personal investigation, with a little bit of thought and a little bit of time, will prove effective and cheaper than hiring someone.

At one time, you can only find this kind of personal information you are looking under professional help. However, in today's society, new technology is the future of the daily life. Doing this things are becoming a thing easier, cheaper way. You still have to pay for information finally, but certainly less than to pay someone to do your work. Fortunately, these sites allow you to carry out your own personal on-line survey, that is, you can choose according to your own contributions to the general plan If a site is too expensive, to find another one. If a site does not provide you with enough information, you are looking for, then move on and look forward to another. It will take time to find the best sites, but there is for your needs, but also your budget. All things take time, this is no exception.

How to Stop Data Leaks

One of the great things about the Internets is that it provides universal connectivity between your desktop and the world. But that is also a tremendous weakness and security professionals often lose sleep over how easy it is for a rogue employee to email a friend - or even his private Webmail account - their entire customer list or other confidential information. There have been a number of products to try to track or block leaking data, and this week I was testing one of them called TrueDLP from Code Green Networks. The idea is fairly simple: you install their appliance on your network, point out your most sensitive data, and then it watches over your packets and sees what is leaving the premises. It doesn't take that long to setup and install, once you figure out what it is doing and what you are doing.

The tricky part is figuring out exactly what is your most sensitive data, and being able to focus in on it in a way that the product can identify. It comes with dozens of various templates to be able to recognize social security numbers, or names and addresses, or stock symbols, or other kinds of well-formatted data. But the real plus is being able to handle unformatted data, such as a memo about a customer's preferences that is just a Word document, for example. Code Green can connect to a SQL database and directly handle the query syntax to select particular data types, and it can also connect via WebDAV to Sharepoint servers or other document repositories too. Once you find your data, you create protection policies and tell the appliance what to do - whether to just log the violation or actually block the activity.

You also need to make sure that you are matching everything properly, because the last thing you want to have on your hands is a series of false positives that you have to chase down. You can also set up fancier things, such as automatically requiring emails between two places (such as your office and a partner) to go out encrypted. Speaking of encryption, they work with the Blue Coat Web proxies so that even if someone is using SSL connections to talk to their Webmail accounts they can take those packets apart and see what someone is doing. That is pretty spooky, but hey, you have been warned!

There are other things that the product does, such as being able to detect content on removable USB thumb drives, or even block their usage entirely. This is the way of the world: as these drives get beyond 64 GB (yes, gigabytes), they are more of a threat for someone to just literally take an entire database out the door in their pocket. I recently ran up against this when I was in my bank trying to provide documentation for a loan. I had brought a CD, a USB thumb drive, and had saved the documents on my Google account just for good measure. Because of the bank's endpoint security lockdown policies, I was 0 for 3 and had to send them the old fashioned way, by making paper copies, once I got home. At least it was nice to know that they had protected their employee's PCs.

The interesting thing is what happens after customers get their hands on this Code Green product. Lawsuits typically ensue, so to speak, because often the network administrator finds someone is doing something that they aren't supposed to be doing. One of the product managers I was working with told me that this usually happens within the first week of the product being put into production. Given that the basic price of the product is ten grand, I figure that is as close to instant ROI as you are going to get these days, considering the cost of most litigation.

So take a gander over at http://www.WebInformant.tv and watch the four-minute video of the Code Green appliance. It is a very innovative way to detect and prevent data leaks and well worth a closer look.

David Strom is a noted speaker, author, podcaster and consultant who has written two books and thousands of magazine articles for dozens of IT publications such as Computerworld, eWeek, Baseline Magazine, Information Week and Information Security magazine. His blog can be found at http://strominator.com - and he can be reached at david@strom.com

Are We Still Behind the Hackers?

The recent developments regarding the Large Hadron Collider - a machine built to try and figure out how the Big Bang happened - were overshadowed not long after the experiment started by news that hackers had managed to access one of the computers being used for the experiment to register their distaste at what was going on.

While the experiment itself was unharmed the general public cannot now find out what is going on because the website related to it has been hacked and cannot be accessed.

So in answer to the question posed by the title of this piece, the answer would appear to be that we are still some way behind them.

Hackers act on all kinds of motives, and one of the reasons why they have so many opportunities to hack into websites is that some people think they are only at risk if their site takes payment information from others. That simply isn't the case, because some hackers do what they do simply to compromise internet security, or to make a point of how easy it can be to hack into a facility. There are numerous examples of hackers managing to get past the defences of government websites and those relating to parts of the law, so there is clearly no single reason why websites are continuing to be hacked into and exposed as being insecure as a result.

But there are services out there that use ethical hacking to expose and plug weaknesses in websites, and it is these services that should be used more and more if we are to keep on top of the hackers, rather than it being the other way around.

After all, wouldn't you rather pay the money to get an ethical hacker to try and break through your defences so they can remedy any problems you may have, than wait for someone who isn't so ethical to do it for you? In the latter case you won't get any help to make sure no one else gets through - all you will get is hassle and the problems they leave behind.

Just as people are coming up with new ways to break through systems, so the ethical hacking companies are developing ways to combat them, and if you want your business to be as secure as it can possibly be then you owe it to yourself, your staff and your clients to pay for the best knowledge out there today.

So in reality, it is perfectly true that a lot of companies are still behind the hackers and are running the risk of being hacked into and subjected to a lot of damage every single day. It is those businesses who have essentially invested the money in their future that will remain as secure as it is possible to be, as they have hired the best computer security company they can afford to make sure they are fully protected both now and in the future.

And why try and keep up with all the developments yourself when you can hire the professionals to do it for you?

Pure Hacking helps protect your Internet security by providing world-class penetration testing and ethical hacking risk management services. For a free consultation, please visit Penetration Testing.