Protect yourself from spammers and scammers

In February of this year, I was having breakfast with a group of writers at the San Francisco Writers Conference. The talk segued from our usual angst about getting agents to the nifty new toys and tools now available for writers. One of the women had a thin, lightweight word processor about the size of a notebook. She told us how wonderful it was to be able to write anywhere, and then go home and just plug it into her computer and download her work. Everyone at the table was awed until I asked if she had any firewall or encryption on her system. I would have been just as enthused as everyone else had been except that just the week before I had interviewed several police officers who were members of the Menomonie Police Department’s Computer Analysis & Response Team. Each one stressed to me how easy it is for criminals to use the Internet to access personal information. If your PDA (or, in the case of the writer at breakfast—nifty new word processor) is able to synchronize (communicate) with your home computer, a thief with computer knowledge can also use your PDA/nifty tool to access all the records on your home computer. “They can obtain information on your computer unless it is encrypted for security,” Officer Jim Jasicki said. Encryption, or making information unreadable without the code, is one of the ways to make communications devices and computers safer from criminals. Like his counterparts in other law enforcement jurisdictions throughout the country, Investigator Dave Pellett of the Menomonie Police Department is concerned about the rising number of financial crimes reported. In most cases, financial crimes, which include identify theft, involve obtaining and using private information to access money. “We don’t have control over the security at our credit card companies, but we can use caution whenever we are doing online financial transactions,” noted Investigator Pellett. “Also, if you are at an Internet café or on campus, be cautious about conducting business on wireless networks. Someone may be intercepting your transaction.” As writers, we may focus on our words, but we must also take some reasonable precautions to ensure someone else isn’t focusing on our numbers—like our bank accounts. For additional information on how to safeguard your words and numbers, contact your local police department’s cyber crime squad, or check on your state’s official web site for information. You can also check the web site established by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center. This web site, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), provides information on a variety of computer and Internet crimes and their prevention, as well as being a way for people to report potential crimes. The IC3 web site is located at http://www.ic3.gov/. For information about the 2008 San Francisco Writers Conference, visit the web site at http://www.sfwriters.org/index.cfm