Before the world was exposed to the infinite stream of resources via the Internet, there were limited ways of garnering information. Although radio, telephones, and television have existed for decades, no other means of technology has revolutionized the way people communicate more than the Internet. After all, it didn’t acquire the nickname the “Information Super Highway” for no reason.

And while the boundless torrent of voices on the Internet have become an invaluable tool in modern-day decision making for both individuals and businesses, a far more nefarious industry has spawned from the unfettered access offered by the Internet: the online tarnishing of reputations. With various outlets in existence, including consumer review websites such as Yelp.com and RipoffReport.com, blogs, social networking sites, and other personal websites, the opportunities to smear the name of a person or company are essentially limitless.

Of course the original intentions of these websites was not to hurt others, but rather to unite people who share common interests, as well as to provide a sense of equality and justice for those of us who have genuine concerns or complaints. However, the world is big and Internet access has become more status quo than ever, leaving the days of privileged web surfing in the proverbial dust.

As a result, there are countless individuals who abuse this vital instrument. Despite all the extraordinary developments the Internet has bestowed upon modern-day society, it has simultaneously created a platform for a population rife with individuals whose sole purpose is to ruin the reputations of both people and businesses. Just one person can utilize dozens, even hundreds of these websites to post anonymous defamatory reviews and comments about a person or business.

This can be a costly situation, ultimately compromising the character and profitability of any entity, no matter how well established outside the Web; while a trusted reputation takes years to build up among consumers, it can take only one determined individual and a few hours to destroy it. Worst of all, it is a difficult task to bring these individuals to justice, as they are protected by the anonymity the Internet provides.

This is why numerous reputation management companies have sprung up across the virtual community. However, just like any service industry, some of these companies may prove more effective than others. At Kessler, our state-of-the-art Web.Sweep^® Internet Monitoring software can help individuals and businesses protect themselves against damaging material posted across the vast plane of the Internet.

By combing through the entire Internet, including any information generated by search engines, this technology can help preserve a company or individual’s reputation, as well as assist in the defense against unauthorized use of intellectual property. Whether eliminating or burying search results containing derogatory content, the protection of an individual or company’s online reputation is a necessary practice in today’s cyber-oriented world.

Black Friday madness and annoying in-laws aside, this time of year is generally symbolic with the spirit of family, joy, and most importantly, generosity. Giving to charities, especially around the holidays, can be a truly rewarding experience. Unfortunately, the FraudBusters^® team at Kessler has been alerted of numerous instances of charity fraud, demonstrating that for as many folks out there who can spare the extra cash for the sake of someone else’s merriment, there are just as many waiting to take advantage of their altruism.

And while people might gasp at this inauspicious fact while shaking their heads in dismay, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Although modern technology has led to an unequivocal progression in society, it has also ushered in a new age of con artists and the worst breed of opportunists.

With so many natural disasters occurring around the world, there is no shortage of people in need. For instance, after a devastating F-5 tornado ravaged the town of Joplin, Missouri in May, people from around the country felt compelled to help this ruined city recover any semblance of normalcy.

But alas, as the whole world watched while the citizens of Joplin navigated through both physical and emotional damage, others were waiting to capitalize on their grief and the compassion of those willing to give.  According to Chris Koster, Missouri’s attorney general, an investigation was commenced regarding a Puerto Rican online group operating under the name of Alivio Foundation, Inc. and Georgia online radio operator Steven Blood.

This group solicited funds via the Internet, which they claimed would go to St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in Joplin and to Catholic Charities of Southern Missouri. However, these charities reported that the money was never received. To make matters worse, Koster stated that this is only one of 260 complaints he is investigating relating to probable bogus Joplin tornado charities.

Charities advocating for cures and research of human diseases are not immune from fraudulent activity either. In September, a couple in Great Neck, New York plead guilty to charges of grand larceny and scheming to defraud after establishing a phony charity called the Coalition for Breast Cancer Cures, which deceived donators into believing they were contributing to breast cancer research.

According to court documents, they instead ended up funding David and Mindy Winston’s lavish trips and Louis Vuitton shopping extravaganzas. But, at the very least, the Winstons’ victims can sleep well knowing part of their donations went toward education: the Winstons paid their daughter’s sorority dues with the charity’s funds.

Considering this is the season for giving, the point of this isn’t to foster cynicism and deter people from helping those in need, but rather to be stringent when choosing charitable causes. There are many ways of ensuring that you get the most out of giving. Initially, you should hone in on a specific cause that speaks to you. After all, it’s your money. You wouldn’t want your goodwill benefitting an organization that is fundamentally incompatible with your personal beliefs.

This is where diligent Internet research comes in handy. Of course, Internet research is not always reliable and can leave you mired in uncertainty, despite the reassuring “.org” at the end of a charity’s Web address. The truth of the matter is that anybody can register this type of domain name, which is why verifying a charity’s legitimacy through several different avenues is essential.

First, it is important to locate a viable physical mailing address and phone number. If this information is missing from an organization’s website, it should be an immediate indicator to conduct further research. A genuine charity will gladly volunteer this information to you, as well as a detailed synopsis of its mission. Second, there are various free resources out there that exist solely to assist interested parties in navigating through potential charities. The Better Business Bureau offers a free service on its website at www.bbb.org/us/charity, where the credentials of any charity can be authenticated.

Another helpful tool is Guidestar.org, a website dedicated to dispersing information about non-profit organizations. GuideStar provides free IRS data regarding registered charitable organizations. Along with Guidestar, Charitynavigator.org and Give.org are two other websites where you can determine a charity’s “program ratio,” which refers to the amount of your donation that goes toward the charity’s actual mission versus the amount that helps fund the administrative and fundraising aspect of the organization.

If you happen to come across a charity in your own research, you should use caution, but when an organization attempts to solicit donations from you directly by e-mail or phone, you should be wary and even more rigorous in your investigation. You should always obtain specific contact information of the individual claiming to be with the organization, along with a telephone number and address, and confirm it in every way possible by using the previously discussed websites.

Kessler International is pleased to announce that they have hired two new staff members, Brian Rubin and Jessica Small.  We are confident that they are excellent additions to our team and look forward to working with them.

While browsing Amazon.com on October 19, 2011, our antivirus system popped up notifications 35 times as we browsed the site. Every instance came up as “detected: virus ‘HEUR:Trojan.Script.Iframer’ (modification).” This is a heuristic virus detection which means our antivirus did not detect it as an actual virus or trojan but it did detect that the page was trying to do something potentially nefarious.

As it happens, this virus was attempting to open a hidden IFrame which could have contained a Trojan.  Fortunately, we were protected by our antivirus solution.

This is just a reminder that you can never be too secure when browsing the Internet.  Browsing without an antivirus solution in place is like swimming in shark infested waters with a bleeding leg.  Even a site like Amazon.com that you would never suspect to get a virus or trojan from could have a hidden script waiting to infect your PC. Be sure to verify your antivirus solution is working and that its virus definitions are up to date.

Triage, the new product by AccessData, is a computer forensic tool that can be used to acquire data from computers when they boot and can also be used as a live acquisition tool to acquire data from a computer that is currently turned on. However, Triage has one significant problem.

For live acquisitions to work, you need to have access to a USB port. Many corporations block access to USB ports or at least write protect them. If this is the case, Triage simply won’t work. If you need a live acquisition, you’ll need to modify something on the computer to enable the USB ports which could be considered tampering with evidence. The best case scenario would be software that blocks USB ports that can be easily turned off but if the block is done with a registry change it may require rebooting the computer but you will be unable to get the live acquisition you needed.

As a professional courtesy, we wanted to bring this to the attention of the industry. We have experienced a significant loss of productivity and time as a result of this.

Kessler International will be exhibiting at the INTA Trademark Administrators Conference in Los Angeles Sunday through Tuesday at Booth 8.

While the West Coast has earthquakes and forest fires, and the middle of the United States is commonly referred to as Tornado Alley, the East Coast is typically not an area of the country associated with natural disasters. But in a matter of a week — following the 5.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Virginia and shook states north and south, and the destructive path left by Hurricane Irene — millions of people living on the East Coast were quickly reminded of how unpredictable life can be.

Five days since the earthquake, aftershocks are still being felt in the Virginia area. And less than a day removed from Hurricane Irene, estimates peg at least 29 people having died from the storm, while millions are without power and flooding has made transportation in some areas nearly impossible.

For those who find themselves on the wrong side of prepared, instances like these always result in regret and “woulda, shoulda, coulda” scenarios. Not because anything can be done to prevent an earthquake, hurricane or other natural disaster from striking, but because, with the proper insurance, the financial toll these disasters take can be severely mitigated.

Kessler International offers a range of services which can assist both insured and insurers in the immediate aftermath of devastation such as what we witnessed in the past week. Simply put, time is money, all the more so when damages reaching into the five-, six-, and seven-digit figures are incurred.

With the help of Kessler’s forensic accountants, you will come away with more than just a number with a dollar sign in front of it. That’s because the team at Kessler International will take the time to prepare an encompassing report written in plain English, so you will know exactly what is owed and understand the monetary breakdown behind it. And Kessler’s 23 years of experience dealing with clients large and small mean an investigation can be tailored to your exact needs.

With the myriad other things to worry about following a natural disaster, why add insurance claims to the list? Let the experts at Kessler International take one headache off your mind and deliver fast and precise results.

The Motion Picture Association, the group representing the interests of the motion picture industry in Great Britain, has secured a court ruling ordering English internet service provider BT to block access to the popular Usenet site Newzbin, claiming that it is primarily used as a portal to illegally download copyrighted materials such as music, movies, and videogames.

This move has prompted an outcry from open internet activists, who are concerned about the prevalence of censorship in the digital age.

This move is the latest—and the most desperate—by an industry struggling to fight the growing threat of internet piracy, which copyright holders claim is killing their businesses.

Though this ruling has wide-reaching implications in the U.K., where BT has stated that they will not appeal the ruling, attitudes in the U.S. are different. Google, one of the world’s largest companies and a massive internet presence, has said that they will do everything in their power to fight the passage of a similar law on American shores, citing censorship concerns.

BT already has a filter in place that blocks user access to sites which depict child sexual abuse. Representatives from the MPA argue that the same logic that informs blocking offensive and illegal content such as child pornography can be applied to sites which allow access to copyrighted materials.

Industry woes over endemic copyright infringement have clashed with open internet activists, who advocate an open and free internet without usage caps or exterior regulation.

The MPAA, America’s counterpart to the MPA, has been fighting internet piracy in the United States with tooth and nail—and limited success. Attempts to curb piracy have led to numerous court battles, arrests, and heated public exchanges over the definition of free speech as it applies to the Internet.

With new technology cropping up every day and internet users using better tools and techniques to avoid the copyright enforcement brigades, this issue shows no signs of abating in the years to come.

If you have concerns about copyright infringement, call Kessler International today. We’ll work with you to ferret out infringement and help you bring offenders to justice.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The recent News of the World hacking debacle has raised serious questions about the company’s integrity—the kind of questions that stoke lawsuits. Granted, News of the World was more National Enquirer than New York Times­—it had a track record of settling its numerous libel suits out of court—but in a time where print news media is struggling to justify its relevance in an increasingly digital world, these accusations are proving ruinous to parent company News Corporation. The company lost $7 billion over a period of just four days, according to Bloomberg News, and founder and owner Rupert Murdoch has pumped $2 billion of his own money into the company to save its plummeting stock price.

With such a severe economic backlash, what, exactly, was News of the World—once Britain’s leading tabloid newspaper, which printed its last issue on July 10—accused of doing? For starters, it was accused of using a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, to pay off corrupt police officers in return for locations of the cell phones of individuals of interest to the paper—celebrities, sports stars, even terror and murder victims. This sort of thing has been going on for a while: royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed in 2007 over similar allegations.

Additionally, News of the World is accused of paying Mulcaire to hack into the cell phones of over 7,000 people in order to listen to their voicemails—people like celebrities and sports stars, yes, but also murder and terror victims, and the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and children. This violation of privacy backfired most infamously in the case of Milly Dowler, who was kidnapped in 2002 and later found murdered. Numerous voicemails—potential evidence—had allegedly been deleted from her cell phone in Spring 2002 by News of the World reporters hoping to clear out her mailbox for new messages to listen to.  Activity on their missing daughter’s phone before the discovery of her body led the Dowlers to cling to hope she was still alive, and may have had a detrimental impact on the Scotland Yard investigation.

Rupert Murdoch is alleged to have put pressure on former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to not investigate these allegations. Now, after Murdoch was forced to drop a £8 billion (about $12 million) bid for BSkyB—a major British satellite broadcaster—due to severe opposition from Parliament, and numerous lawsuits are filed by individuals alleging their own phones had been hacked by News of the World, News Corp appears to be quickly losing popular and governmental favor in one of their strongest former markets.

Trapped alone in her home, physically vulnerable, cut off from surviving friends and family and unable to defend herself—sounds like the heroine of a horror movie, doesn’t it? Now imagine that this character is a little over eighty, can’t move very well, and her tormentor may very well be the one person she has to trust and rely on, and you’re beginning to form a rough picture of elder abuse in the United States.

Elder abuse is one of the fastest growing crimes in the country, with victims across every socioeconomic class, race, and culture; it has touched between 700,000 and 3.5 million elderly and vulnerable Americans, yet still remains vastly underreported. Experts say that while one in ten elders will experience abuse, only one out of every six cases of actual abuse will make it to the proper authorities. Instances of underreporting are especially high among seniors suffering from diminished mental capacity due to diseases like dementia or Alzheimer’s—unable to speak out about their predicament, they rely upon others to notice and report on their behalf. And these numbers don’t include seniors living in nursing homes or suffering from dementia: these numbers may well be even higher.

So what constitutes elder abuse? The National Center on Elder Abuse defines seven areas of elder abuse: physical abuse, emotional/psychological abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation/financial abuse, neglect, abandonment, and self-neglect. Not all of these abuses are easy to spot, and many of them require the individual to be plugged in to the world around them—to still have social contacts, a network of friends or trusted companions—that they can turn to when the abuse starts.

So what can you keep an eye out for?

Physical abuse often manifests itself in bruises, lacerations or broken bones—easy enough to spot if you’re looking for it. More insidious kinds of abuse—psychological or emotional abuse, for example—are more difficult to identify; the symptoms are often subtle, like a withdrawal from previously beloved activities or unexplained changes in behavior. Sexual abuse is much more common among seniors physically unable to give consent, such as those suffering from Alzheimer’s, though this kind of abuse may manifest itself physically in bruises or sexually transmitted diseases. Dehydration, malnutrition, and lack of proper medical care are noticeable signs of neglect or self-neglect—possibly the most common form of elder abuse, and the kind that most often leads to premature death. Also keep an eye on your elderly family members’ finances: unexplained withdrawals from the bank or sudden alterations of wills and trusts may be indicative of exploitation, which is thought to be responsible for a loss of $2.6 billion annually from elders.

This may all seem very overwhelming—if elders are being abused behind closed doors all across the country, what can I possibly do about it?

Believe it or not, quite a bit.

Isolation is the single greatest risk factor associated with elder abuse: an elder with no one around to turn to is significantly less likely to report abuse or have it noticed by others. Pay your elderly neighbors a visit at home or op to talk to them in church or temple; you’ll both be grateful for the human contact, and it will help them feel less isolated and give them a chance to speak out about any abuse they may be suffering. Notice if they are nervous, withdrawn, or show some signs of abuse, especially around certain people. Volunteer for local programs that help elders maintain their health and independence. And fight against stereotypes—our elders were young once, too, and one day, we all will be elders.

Remember: in many states, elder abuse is a felony. Report suspected instances of elder abuse to your local adult protective services agency or law enforcement. And if any elder you know is in immediate danger, dial 911.

Kessler International can help you investigate suspicions of elder financial abuse; our experienced team of forensic accountants will sniff out the money trail and give you the information you need to bring wrongdoers to justice. If you suspect that someone you love is being taken advantage of, Kessler International is here to help. Call us today.