CYBER-HARRASSMENT
Disgruntled staff and angry ex-employees, former romantic partners, and emotionally unstable stalkers may express their pique through anonymous emails designed to harass, cause emotional distress or financially damage their current or former bosses, colleagues, lovers, and competitors. These harassment campaigns may progress from mildly annoying to extremely dangerous, as the perpetrator becomes more threatening, expands the targets of the campaign, or sends defamatory emails to a broader audience, including suppliers, customers, shareholders or board members. Stroz Friedberg provides a host of multi-disciplinary services to identify the perpetrator, assess the danger, preserve evidence of the harassment campaign, and construct and execute a strategy for bringing the conduct to an end.
Identification of the perpetrator may begin by tracing of Internet headers and profiling the adversary’s communications against known data sets of possible subjects. More sophisticated tracing techniques are available if necessary, and law enforcement subpoena power may need to be leveraged if private sector means of identification are insufficient. Should law enforcement involvement be necessary, Stroz Friedberg is well positioned, given the deep law enforcement backgrounds of our personnel, to help structure referral of the matter to the appropriate cyber-crime authorities, and to conduct liaison until resolution of the matter. To attempt to gauge the level of danger posed by the harassment, and evaluate the communications of the harasser, Stroz Friedberg draws on the expertise of Dr. Eric Shaw, an experienced clinical psychologist, former intelligence agency profiler, and cyber-crime expert, and use of a proprietary patented software tool developed by Dr. Shaw and Stroz Friedberg. This software tool uses psycho-linguistic algorithms to evaluate communications for levels of anger, entitlement, victimization, and other emotional states that can be associated with dangerous conduct.
