Celebrate National Cyber Security Awareness Month with ReputationDefender

Source: ReputationDefender Blog

By Rob Frappier

October is the Sixth Annual National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Cyber Security Alliance, the theme of this year’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month is “Our Shared Responsibility.”

“Our Shared Responsibility” is about individuals taking a pro-active stance in protecting their privacy and security online. Rather than relying on the government or industry groups to regulate how you use the Internet, take it upon yourself to protect yourself online. You should also take some time to teach your children about the Internet and the things that they should and shouldn’t do online.

For some great advice on how to protect yourself and your family online, check out these “Top Tips” from the National Cyber Security Alliance. Of course, here at ReputationDefender, we think about cyber security 365 days a year, so we have lots of great resources you can check out as well. If you’d like to learn more about how ReputationDefender can help you stay safe online, contact one of our Online Reputation Management experts today.

Sue Scheff: ReputationDefender and iKeepSafe Provide Online Reputation Resources to Guidance Counselors

Many people know I highly recommend ReputationDefender not only for online reputation management, but for their services to protect children online and your privacy. Here is a great merge of two fantastic organization working towards helping teens, kids and all stay safe in space!

Source: ReputationDefender Blog

ReputationDefender and iKeepSafe Provide Online Reputation Resources to Guidance Counselors

ReputationDefender has been working with the Internet Keep Safe Coalition (iKeepSafe), a non-profit that works for the health and safety of youth online, to create resources that help guidance counselors educate kids in the US about how their online reputations can keep them safe, and help (rather than harm) their ability to get into college — Download ReputationDefender’s guide to keeping your kids safe online today!

iKeepSafe launched Project PRO (Privacy & Online Reputation) at this summer’s American School Counselors Association annual meeting in Dallas, TX. I’d like to send a special thank you to our reputation agents who contributed their expertise in creating the booklet, DVD and online materials (http://www.ikeepsafe.org/ASCA) that have now been distributed to educators nationwide.

Marsali Hancock, President of iKeepSafe, on the launch of Project PRO:

“What youth post online today directly impacts their future academic and employment opportunities. ReputationDefender has worked closely with iKeepSafe to develop content for school counselors that teaches students how to protect their privacy online, and help students create an online reputation that is an asset rather than a liability.

We are grateful for ReputationDefender’s support and for sharing their expertise about managing and building an online reputation that opens doors to future opportunities, rather than eliminating them.”

Concerned parents can also find helpful tips in these materials for ensuring the safety of their kids online, and try MyChild to combat the spread of potentially harmful information about their kids online. As always, we here at ReputationDefender recommend that you keep current with technology, keep communicating with your kids about what they’re doing online, and keep checking on their Internet activity. With a great online reputation, the sky is the limit for your kids!

ReputationDefender and iKeepSafe’s 3 Key Tips for Parents:

1. Keep Current with Technology: Talk to teachers about what forms of Internet safety tools they implement in computer labs and technology classes, consider these safety tools for home use, and stay up-to-date on the capabilities of any mobile devices your child may have.

2. Keep Communicating with Your Kids: Find out who your child talks to online, educate your kids about the permanence of any “digital footprints” they leave behind, limit the use of social networks, and make it a habit to engage your kids in critical conversation—the more you talk to your kids about their online usage, the more they will learn to use digital products in a safe and healthy manner.

3. Keep Checking Your Kid’s Internet Activity: Keep computers in a central public location, check your child’s browsing histories, and limit your child’s computer time—there’s a whole world of outdoor and offline activities where they should be involved!

Follow ReputationDefender on Twitter at @RepDef

Sue Scheff: Are you jeopardizing your job with social media?

Source: Baltimore Internet Examiner

By: Chip Dizard
Go to Chip's Home Page

You have heard the horror stories, last year, a North Carolina school district disciplined several faculty members for Facebook content such as personal photos and comments about students. Wired.com reported that an Associated Press staffer in Philadelphia was reprimanded for a Facebook posting that criticized his company.

According to Sharlyn Lauby, president of ITM Group, a human resources consulting firm says "If I can put up pictures of the kids, I can put up pictures from a meeting,". "If I can talk about a recipe I saw with my sister, I can put up an article about something I saw that's work-related. ... People are talking about you, whether you want them to or not. As a company, you need to think about how you want to be positioned."

Companies are now dealing with this dilemma because work and personal lives often collide. Many companies have resorted to blocking social networking sites due to lost productivity and network concerns.

The key for employees to know is that whatever you post online can be used against you. Employers are often checking your online profile as a condition of employment. I had a client recently come to me about a web site link , she consented to do an interview on a major cable network, but it was for a surgery she wanted to keep private. So when you googled her name her employees found out that she had cosmetic surgery. This was something she agreed to with the cable network and it couldn't be taken down. For those people who want to protect their reputation, there are a few companies that will do that for a fee. One that is very popular is Reputation Defender.

Whatever you do, just be wise and trust your gut, if it seems inappropriate it probably is, I always err on the side of caution, especially in the workplace.

Sue Scheff: Help ReputationDefender Support Nikki Catsouras - Sign the Petition

When a family loses a child, I can’t even imagine the pain they endure. How they wake up the next day, how they feel, what they feel and how they go on with life. When a family loses a child in a tragic accident it seems it could only compound all the feelings of loss.

On October 31, 2006 the Catsouras family experienced the nightmare every parent fears - losing a teen in a tragic automobile accident.

The accident was the beginning of an emotional roller coaster. If you haven’t heard about this story, it is time to take a moment and help make a difference. Nikki Catsouras, after having a horrific car accident was dead on impact, the scene was described as shocking as Nikki’s head was nearly decapitated.

Can you even imagine as a parent, learning of this? Can you imagine living through this? As a parent advocate and a parent of two young adults now, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what this family has gone through.

What follows next is nothing short of evil, in my opinion. Shortly after Nikki was buried, her parents and sisters still in mourning, the Internet creeped into their lives in the most heinous way. Photo’s of Nikki’s crime scene were posted online! Yes, their daughter’s body, or what was left of it, was going viral! Where is justice? Who in God’s name would do this?

Please take a moment to read “A Tribute to Nikki Catsouras” and sign the petition to help create reasonable protection for personal privacy on the Internet.

Sue Scheff: Twitter - Identity Theft?

O-kay, I don’t get the Twitter craze, however it is obvious I am the one missing out as I hear about it from many media sources etc. Learn more about how to keep safe on this “Twitter” - as with many social networks, approach with caution - but you can still have fun.

Source: ReputationDefender Blog

In case you didn’t already know, Twitter is the latest “it” fad in the world of social media. From Demi Moore’s suicide prevention tweeting to the news of a potential Google-Twitter merger, it seems that not one week goes by without a major news story about the popular microblogging service.

Unfortunately, it isn’t all wine and roses at Twitter. Since the service emerged in 2006, one of the consistent complaints against it has been the ease with which individuals can set up phony accounts in someone else’s name. With such a large volume of users, it is impossible for Twitter to monitor each individual sign-up for validity. This means that someone could send out hundreds of tweets under your name, before you caught on. That’s what happened to Televangelist Robert H. Schuller, whose Twitter problem was discussed in a recent article at MSNBC.com.

From the article:

Televangelist Robert H. Schuller has reached millions worldwide with his weekly “Hour of Power” TV broadcasts, but when it comes to the Internet, he had a high-tech headache: an online impostor.

When Schuller, the founder of the Crystal Cathedral megachurch, recently tried to set up an account on the micro-blogging Web site Twitter.com, he discovered another user masquerading as himself.
[SNIP]
Schuller’s impersonator — who remains unidentified — seemed to know a lot about that history and the preacher’s life, said Nason, the spokesman. The impostor said in his early tweets that he was Schuller’s assistant, but then went on to say he was Schuller himself and even talked about the preacher’s wife, Nason said.

“The content seemed fairly normal for someone like Dr. Schuller to say,” Fayer said. “But in the future you don’t know how they’re going to use that. What if they start asking people to send money and say, ‘Send money to X,Y,Z’?”

The rest of the article details several other prominent phony Twitter accounts including a fake Stephen Colbert and a fake Tina Fey.

While it may not seem like a big deal to some, it is important to note that Reverend Schuller is a very prominent individual with a PR staff dedicated to catching issues like this. For the average person, it could be months before a Twitter fraud is exposed. That is why it is more important than ever for individuals to take full control of their image online and be proactive in Online Reputation Management.

ReputationDefender Blog and Face.com

If you thought that untagged photos of you on Facebook were not going to affect your online reputation, you’ve got another thing coming. According to the New York Times, a new application utilizes facial recognition software to find public, untagged photos online.

From the page:

This one is kinda scary because of how well it works. Face.com’s new Photo Finder application for Facebook helps you automatically discover public photos that you and your friends may have forgotten to tag — and it also lets you track untagged photos of your friends.
Face-recognition technology is itself not new, but Photo Finder’s twist is how it makes use of Facebook’s interface. The social network only shows you photos of yourself containing tags about you — your name and profiled, associated with you in a given photo. Up until now, untagging a photo is how you hide a photo from your Facebook friends — the other option is to use more advanced privacy settings that restrict photo viewing to specific friends, but I’m not sure how many people use that feature.

With Face.com, your friends can bypass such social engineering to directly stalk you, or visa versa as the case may be.
[SNIP]

Sue Scheff: ReputationDefender Blog

Source: ReputationDefender Blog

Taking it Offline: The Lingering Importance of Face-to-Face Networking in a Digital World

With the rise and blossoming of online networking sites like LinkedIn and ClaimID, many people, especially younger people, are doing the majority of their business networking online. This phenomenon is not anything new, and it has been covered in this blog and elsewhere.

But while it may be easier to sit in front of the computer screen and interact with your peers, it is hard to think that interpersonal relationships can ever be fully fleshed out (if you will) in the digital sphere. Face-to-face networking will never go away. The information on the Internet is not always accurate (although that doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant, according to Google’s algorithms), and there is a lot to be said for looking someone in the eyes.

Today people should try to balance their “new school” digital networking with the “old school” tried and true methods. The approach will literally double the amount of chances a person has to make an impact with a potential employer, and the effort required to do so is not unreasonable (point of fact, until a few years the “old school” method was the only game in town).LinkedIn and other popular business networking sites thrive because they offer an alternative to actually speaking with a fellow networker. The information you put in the profile becomes the equivalent of a hand shake and a greeting. Thus, a user profile, for business purposes, should be looked at as an opportunity to distinguish yourself as someone others want to know and be connected to.There are small and effective steps one can take to achieve this. Focus on brevity. 100 words is enough to grab someone’s attention and establish a positive image. If done correctly, a LinkedIn profile can, for practical purposes, be the difference between just another interview and a job offer. Conversely, a poorly written profile can have you knocked out of the running before you even get started.

Many employers look at LinkedIn as a sort of research tool. A resume can only say so much about a person, and employers are always looking to find out the little bits about a potential employee that are not immediately apparent. This fact has had disastrous consequences for some people whose Facebook and MySpace profiles contain otherwise unflattering images/language/etc. We’ve blogged that story here more than once.

Online business networking profiles are still just a piece of the puzzle, though. A successful blend of the old and the new networking techniques will counteract the deficiencies inherent in both approaches. A human touch in the new digital landscape goes a long way towards maintaining awareness and crafting image, while drawing in more localized business and opening channels previously untapped.