Consider the story of one unfortunate Internet user, as told by ex Edmonton cop Dave Johnston. True story, says Johnston; a guy downloaded some porno pictures onto his personal computer at home. He got what he wanted, but a lot more besides, thanks to a program clandestinely embedded in the downloaded information.
“It shut down his dial up and re-dialed a 1-900 number in Moldova,” says Johnston, “at $25 a minute.”
From then on until the computer was shut off several hours later, the man’s dial-up service was costing him 25 bucks for every minute on-line. After doing its dirty work, the program niftily erased all evidence of itself.
“He didn’t know anything about it until he got his phone bill,” says Johnston.
That’s just one of the unpleasant – and not the most unpleasant by far – stories from ‘Internet: The Dark Side,’ a presentation by Johnston and his partner in crime detection and prevention, George Sidor. Together, they are Geek With A Gun, a firm that consults police forces on Internet crime. They spoke to a Slave Lake audience on Apr. 29.
Johnston and Sidor grew up together in Edmonton, joined the city police force and founded that agency’s first tech crimes unit in 1995. Johnston got his start in tech policing a decade earlier, shortly after the EPS decided to purchase desktop computers. When the brass found out they were being used for playing games, Johnston got the job of removing them.
“I was the most hated man on the force,” he says.
It was in the second half of the 1990s though, when the Internet blossomed into general use, that the need for a tech crimes unit became apparent. Because as soon as anonymous computer-to-computer communication became available, criminals started using it, and none more assiduously than pedophiles. For the next seven years, the two tech cops’ beat became the cyber world of news groups and chat rooms, where such people lurk, preying upon the gullible.
The gullible are often young girls who think they are talking to someone of their own age and sex who understands their problems. Over time, a relationship can develop where key information is shared. It can, and has led to actual meetings and abductions.
In one case, “there was a 15-year-old girl going on a band trip,” says Sidor. “The guy she’s chatting with ‘happens’ to be in the same city where the band is going.”
The girl had planned to slip away from the group at the airport, but her mother had found a suspicious letter and alerted the police. They intervened and she never met her contact, who turned out, in fact, to be a pedophile, Sidor says. Others have not been as lucky.
The stalkers who hang around in chat rooms and news groups are never as they appear, says Sidor.
“They are the masters of seduction. They know the answers to the questions.”
Nowadays, Sidor and Johnston train police officers to masquerade as 13-year-old girls in Internet chat rooms, the better to attract the attention of such stalkers. They have some success, but the Internet is a very big place, and police resources are few.
“Education is the best way to deal with it,” says Johnston.
The 20-odd people at the Slave Lake session certainly got an education in the unethical uses the Internet can be put to. Viruses, spyware, worms, trojan horses, hacking, spam, keyloggers – all names of various methods of attacking ones computer, from the frivolously destructive to the efforts to steal information. It pays, they told their audience, to be aware of what’s out there, and to keep up with the latest prevention software.
“Your computer can be completely taken over,” Johnston said, if it isn’t adequately protected.
Each day in the United States, 7.3 billion commercial e-mail messages are sent. Most of it qualifies as ‘spam’, the electronic equivalent of junk mail.
Some of those e-mails have attachments that contain malicious programs, or at least mischievous programs, such as ones that cause persistent pop up advertising. The solution? Get rid of those attachments.
“If people would not double click on attachments, 99 per cent of viruses would just go away,” says Johnston.
Pedophiles in chat rooms won’t go away, but there are things parents can do to reduce that risk as well.
“Don’t put the computer in the kid’s bedroom,” Sidor advises. “Nothing beats good supervision.”
Oh, and whatever you do, don’t give out any personal information in a chat room or newsgroup. No phone numbers, no addresses, no home e-mail addresses, and “especially not credit card numbers.”
Interestingly enough, Johnston and Sidor both shop and do banking on line. Doing business with reputable companies on-line is not that risky, they maintain. On the other hand, watch out for ‘cloned’ websites, that is pirated copies of websites that look like the real thing but aren’t. If you give your VISA number on one of those you could be in trouble.
E-mail isn’t secure, by the way.
“Don’t send anything that you’re not willing to get up and say in front of a group like this,” says Sidor.
Web-based e-mail (such as hotmail) is even less secure.
“It takes about a minute-and-a-half to take over a hotmail account,” says Johnston. “How do you really know who you’re talking to?”
He recommends that friends establish passwords between themselves, so they can be sure.

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