Summary Of Cynthia Hetherington's Article Ensnared The Web

In the article Ensnared The Web, Cynthia Hetherington, who is a certified fraud examiner talks about the use of open source tools. She mentions that since we live in an internet based society, we have these tools at the click of button. She says that with the use of these tools we are able to legally gather intel information about a certain suspect or entity. She mentions that through social media sites like facebook, twitter, and with the addition of blogging sites and search engines, she can find legal information that can be used. She first mentions a google tool called google alerts. She mentions this tool because she used it in one of her cases when she had to hunt down a stolen truck with merchandise for a client in which the outcome

She talks about organizations having to protect their reputations. She says if they don’t monitor what is being said about their company or organization, rumors would spread and this can dramatically effect a company. She also talks about preventing protests as well as this helps to maintain a healthy reputation for a particular company. A company should also monitor his/or her employees blogging habits as well as it could also hurt their reputation especially if one or more people are writing bad things every day. She then goes on to talk about how to go about discovering an insider threat within an organization. She first states that she would find the username online and then compare it with other social media sites to find out more about the insider. She says that through this, you can gather additional information and compare it with what he gave the company when they hired him. Besides this, she says that even by googling the user themselves also helps to find info as well. She states that this is important, because each member of a social media site has a number attached to them. This makes googling them fairly easy as this helps to show their actual name. She said this method was useful in one of her cases because the person she was looking up was a person who ended up pretending to have a college education. She found out that the guy put his place of education on his checks but when in fact he didn’t have any formal education. As she dug deeper into his LinkedIn website, she noticed that it said that he didn’t have any college education. From this case, she was able to conclude that people often misrepresent or boost their life’s accomplishments, just so they can stand out over others even if it is telling