What Can You Do to Protect Yourself from Cyber Stalking?

Join us as we sit down with Private Investigator, Jennifer Brissenden, to discuss practical steps you can take to protect yourself from cyber stalking, and what to do if you find yourself in this situation.

If you would like to speak with one of our attorneys, please call our office at (503) 227-0200, or visit our website at https://www.pacificcascadelegal.com.

To learn more about how Jennifer can help you, you can visit her website: https://brissenden-investigations.com/

Disclaimer: Nothing in this communication is intended to provide legal advice nor does it constitute a client-attorney relationship, therefore you should not interpret the contents as such.

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Modern Family Matters, a podcast devoted to exploring family law topics that matter most to you. Covering a wide range of legal, personal, and family law matters, with expert analysis from skilled attorneys and professional guests, we hope that our podcast provides answers, clarity, and guidance towards a better tomorrow for you and your family. Here's your host, Steve Altishin.


Steve Altishin  0:28  
Hi everyone. I'm Steve Altishin, Director of Client Partnerships here Pacific Cascade Legal. And today we have private investigator Jennifer Brissenden to talk about understanding cyber stalking and what you can to do to protect yourself. Hey, Jennifer, how you doing today?

Jennifer Brissenden  0:49  
Good morning. It's almost Friday, and the sun's peeking through, so I'm good. How are you?

Steve Altishin  0:54  
I'm well for all of those same reasons, before we kind of start again. Why don't you let people know kind of who you are, what you're doing, and why this, this is really a an important topic for you.

Jennifer Brissenden  1:07  
I'm super excited about this topic. It's such an important topic. So I'm Jennifer persenden. I own percent in investigations out in Clackamas County. I'm a one man show out here. Background is in mental health, addictions and law enforcement, but I'm out doing my own thing now. I'm doing a lot of dv stalking, cyber stalking cases. 

Steve Altishin  1:31  
Oh that's perfect. Perfect to talk to you on this, because this is an issue that comes up more and more with, I want to say more difficulty, because of the whole stalking and freedom of speech and all that kind of stuff. So there's a great thing to talk about. And I'm just going to start off with sort of the broad question, you know, what is cyber stalking? And you know, why is it so important to be aware about it?

Jennifer Brissenden  2:01  
Cyber stalking is, I think, very broad, and we're talking about all of those overt signs of cyber stalking, your ID, theft, threats, harassment, defamation. I think those things are really easy to point to and to investigate. I think kind of what I want to focus on today is more in this world of, you know, digital technology, how cyber stalking is being used to monitor and track folks, what

Steve Altishin  2:32  
sort of things go into, or what people do as part of stalking. You know, stalking sort of is, it's not just like hiding around the corner or hiding in the internet. I mean, there's things that they do as well to, you know, to get to somebody.

Jennifer Brissenden  2:52  
Absolutely, I think we talk about stalking way too broad in those you know, obvious. You've got a creeper hiding out in the bushes, standing across from your house, sending you flowers, putting notes on your cars, all of those things, but particularly in in those cases, especially romancement, partner violence, 80% of stalking victims are also victims of cyber stalking. And I think many don't know, and we can get into kind of all the risks that are out there with your information on the internet, and how abusers, stalkers are using that to access all kinds of information that that people probably aren't aware of.

Steve Altishin  3:34  
You mentioned 80% of cyber stalkers also are--How prevalent is that becoming on the internet? Do you see a big shift moving towards technology based cyber stalking? 

Jennifer Brissenden  3:54  
Absolutely, we can hide now. Stalkers can hide. They can do things to protect their identity. In doing this, you're hiding behind a computer screen, and you're therefore minimizing the risk of being caught. And I do want to say like it's cyber stalking is a very difficult thing for law enforcement to investigate and prosecute a I think, because they don't have the time, I think that there's a general consensus that, you know, it's not that dangerous. It might be annoying and frustrating, but it's not that dangerous. So one of the things I actually want to talk about, because I'm so super stoked about it, there is a new Oregon House Bill. I think it's 4156 that takes effect in July, that is going to be such a game changer in this world. So I know, are you familiar with that? You don't mean talk about that at all. Just a little bit.

Steve Altishin  4:46  
No, but tell Yeah. Tell us about it. It's, I know, I do know a little bit about it. It's just fascinating. People need to hear it.

Jennifer Brissenden  4:52  
It's, I mean, in a nutshell, this house bill is modernizing our organ statutes or. On stalking, it's including things that weren't include included before revenge porn, dissemination of nude photos without someone's consent. But the biggest thing that I see changing is as it relates to both criminal and civil, monitoring and tracking is now included on that before it wasn't to get a stalking order, you had to prove someone was actually following you and threatening your safety. Effective July, 1 action can be taken by all this kind of background monitoring tracking activity. So I'm super excited about that, and I think it's going to change the course of a lot of cases.

Steve Altishin  5:37  
Oh, I imagine. I imagine it does or will. It's seems like you said they're hiding so much behind something. And if it's, especially if it's something like monitoring, it's not obvious and and you know it's, it's not overt so much and hard to find. And how can, how can a person you know start to know if it's happening to them? Are there, are there particular you know, indicators they could that, that they should be aware of, to what to work to protect themselves if they don't even know what's happening?

Jennifer Brissenden  6:18  
Yeah, that's a great question. It's hard to know. I think, in working these cases for some time now, I think the biggest indicator is that the other person knows things that they shouldn't know. They have no way of knowing if they're not into your information. I had a recent case where a woman had hired me on a custody case, and within 24 hours of signing that contract with me, which was in her inbox, and her email behavior is completely escalated, we found out down the road, he had been in her email account and had seen that she had hired an investigator, and that really ramped things up there. We'll talk about things that people can do to protect themselves, but any unauthorized login attempts, people don't realize that a lot of accounts, you can actually go in and view your login history. There are some things such as Google, it's one of the best places for information. If people have Gmail accounts, where you can actually look at devices that have attached to your accounts, you can look at some of the IP history. So a lot of it is really being mindful, being aware, checking if you get an alert for an attempted login, actually following up on that and not dismissing it as nothing. Awareness is really the only way that you're going to know for sure

Steve Altishin  7:44  
a cyber stalker in the old age, you know, you kind of the cyber criminals were always these, you know, people with large technology understanding and expertise. It's not that way anymore, is it? With all the social medias, they don't You don't have to be, you know, a techie nerd to be able to be a cyber stalker. So there's so many different ways that you can get in there.

Jennifer Brissenden  8:12  
Yeah, there's tools and there's information. If I want to try and cyber stalk you, I'm going to sit down with Google and I'm going to do a bunch of how tos, and it's going to give me a wealth of information. I don't have to understand all the background about how that's happening. You can actually go online and like, for $70 you can buy a spyware program, where, hypothetically, let's say I wanted to hack into your computer. You know me, I send you a photo that you open, and I have that program embedded within that photo the second you open that I'm actually physically inside your computer. I can see everything you're doing in lifetime. So technology has made it possible. Just simple, you know, YouTube. How do I do this? Searches have made it very possible. You don't have to be IT Savvy anymore.

Steve Altishin  9:01  
It feels like with everyone's connections, with everyone you can you can stalk a person without even going on their computer or their websites, 100%

Jennifer Brissenden  9:13  
so let me talk about Google, because I think that's right. A lot of people use Gmail. It's kind of one of our more popular things. I've done a lot of reports for people on Gmail, and I think a lot of people think of it only as an email service. When you actually go into your Google it is collecting a ton of information about you. It is collecting your entire web search history. I could log into my computer right now and see everything you know back the past two years that I have searched on the internet. I can see maps that I've done from my phone, which can be super high risk if someone is in hiding. I can see a backup of all my photos. I can see Google Drives, so all it takes is. That one entry point into something, and there's like, this entire world of private information about someone. There's financial information that are tied to third party apps there. I mean, it's all it's all right there, by knowing one password or hacking into one system,

Steve Altishin  10:17  
you just said something, and it made me think to myself about maps and can someone know all our devices? Want us to give you know have the our location so they know where we are? Can cyber stalkers get in there and so now they suddenly know where your location is so it could become both cyber stalking and physical stalking, 100%

Jennifer Brissenden  10:46  
recent case examples. I love examples, just because I think it kind of makes it more applicable to people they understand this, the severity of it. This woman, long, long history of dv, divorced from her partner, but she said, I keep feeling like I see him. I don't know how he knows where I'm going. She had location turned off on her phone, but that doesn't do it. There's location on a general setting on your phone, and then you separately have to go into pretty much every single app you use and turn off location for those because by default, companies are following us and tracking us, which sounds paranoid, but it's just the way it is, unless we go in and change that. That's that's what's happening by default. So I got into her Google account and pulled up a timeline, which brings up a US map and a pinpoint of every single place in lifetime that her phone had gone. So he could go back literally four years and see everywhere that her phone went if he were in there, right? Let's say it's Monday morning and he logs in and she's got appointments out in town he's going to see it in lifetime. So maps are a dangerous thing. They're great for us to use if you're like me and completely challenged on how to get anywhere. But they're also very dangerous if you're a stalking victim.

Steve Altishin  12:13  
Yeah, I noticed on, you know, the and they the options, they give you the, you know, turn location off for this or turn it on. The other one is always, you know, turn on when using and you think to yourself, well, I have to have that one on, because otherwise this, this app is no good to me. But if you're using it and it's turned on, they can, they can find it, yes,

Jennifer Brissenden  12:37  
100% and if it's connected, and I know I keep coming back to Google, just because I think it's one of the easier tools to understand. Most of us are logged into email all the time on our phone, right? We're clicking in and out of it throughout the day, doing other things on our phone so that all of that info was showing up, regardless of using your maps or not. If that makes sense,

Steve Altishin  13:01  
so what heck can someone do to protect themselves? So far, our conversation makes it sound like so overwhelming, there's nothing I can do.

Jennifer Brissenden  13:11  
It does. It sounds exactly like that, and it's not easy to protect yourself from it. It's just not easy. But there are things that people can do once they understand it. And there's so many components, right? It's privacy settings. Through social media, a lot of people think, Hey, I'm going to go in and I'm going to use Facebook and as an example, because I'm old and that's what I use. They think, if they go in and make their post private, that they're good to go. I'll talk personally for a minute. I've been a victim of stalking. I have a stalker who was just released from prison as part of kind of making sure I had all my own security in place. I logged out of Facebook, went in through a different account to see what could be seen. I discovered my settings were private, but my mother had shared a bunch of photos that weren't private, and I was tagged in then there were photos of the front of my house, there were photos of the front of their house. So you don't just have to worry about what you're doing, but you have to worry about everyone else that you're connected to and how they're sharing information. Are

Steve Altishin  14:20  
there any someone sitting here looking at their phone going, Well, what do I do? I mean, are there some things they can at least start to do to try to, you know, at least reduce some of this open availability to be seen and followed?

Jennifer Brissenden  14:37  
Yeah, and they're going to need a little time to do it. I think one of my number one recommendations for people is every single company, program, application that you're tied to, any that offer two factor authentication, set it up. Absolutely set it up. Go in and check. I've seen before where those two factor authentications are going to a second phone number or a second device, so that a cyber stalker can actually verify those devices themselves. So go in check, make sure this is my phone number, this is my email, and anytime an unknown device tries to log in, I'm going to immediately get notified. And you can do that on a lot of applications. You can do that in in your bank settings, your email settings, your iCloud settings. That would be my number one recommendation, so that you're getting notified. Privacy settings on social media, oh my gosh. Lock everything down. Lock down what other people can tag you in. Have conversations with them about, you know, making sure their settings are private if they are tagging you, and things changing passwords regularly. I know it's a pain, but thankfully, we have Password Manager apps. Change them. Change them once a month. So if anyone is getting in there, it's going to boot them out, and they're going to have start all over again. Make it like make it difficult on them, at least. Yeah, location settings, those need to be off on everything, absolutely everything. The only one that really needs permission are your maps. When you're using it, everything else. Need permission to view your location. So there's, there's a lot to do, and it's just kind of going through baby steps.

Steve Altishin  16:29  
Yeah, if I come to you and I say, you know, I've found these things, I'm pretty sure I'm being cyber stock, but I don't know. I don't know if I've caught them all. This isn't seems to be like where you you with some of your examples come in where you can help looking for places and finding places and doing something about places that that most of us wouldn't even know, what we don't know.

Jennifer Brissenden  16:56  
Sure I can help people. Disclaimer, I am not a digital forensics expert by any means, but I also understand the basics. And I've worked in this world of dv and stalking long enough that that I know kind of those key places to look. It's a really difficult thing to prove. But if someone is suspecting that they're, you know, being remotely monitored or tracked, I kind of have a checklist of things that I would do, and the first of those would be going over with people, what kind of social media do you have? What are your email accounts? What is your iCloud account? And then systematically going into each one of those, and kind of going through the settings, looking at devices that have connected, looking at IP history, which is also difficult, right? We have IPv sixes. I won't get into all the technology, which are very difficult to track. Our phones are constantly changing IP addresses as we move about the cabin. So it's just kind of a systematic approach, yeah.

Steve Altishin  17:57  
What if, you know, I came in and I said, I know who's doing this. There's no question. I know who's doing this. Can I, or can you go on their social media and try to find out what they're doing? I mean, is it sort of, isn't it? You know, sure, I guess, would say or legal to then go on their social media, or try to find out from their posts and emails from friends of theirs, if they're in fact doing this? Yes, 100%

Jennifer Brissenden  18:29  
are they probably advertising it? Is it that simple? Not likely. Unless they're really profoundly stupid. Most these guys know that what they're doing is illegal, and it's going to be fairly well hidden. But part of any good game is knowing your enemy. So I think you're on to something there. It's very helpful for me to have information about them. Typically, if somebody says, Yeah, I think this is who's doing it right? An ex boyfriend, ex girlfriend, ex spouse, whatever the case may be, I'm going to try and find out info about them. I'm going to try and identify who their internet service provider is, because that's going to be useful info. I'm going to try to figure out what devices they use. I'm going to try and figure out if they have IP addresses that are known specifically to them, that are static. So, yeah, Know Your Enemy 100% Yeah,

Steve Altishin  19:21  
it's kind of like, then you have found things, and I'm assuming that that if you find something, there's a way to record that, or have it set aside, print it out, because at some point, when should someone finally go to the to the police? When? When, when should or an attorney or what should do they have to wait until this person shows up and admits it, or how far into this process should they start contemplating getting someone at least like you in to into with them?

Jennifer Brissenden  19:55  
I think it depends on the extent of the danger that it poses. Is it harassing, or does this person, in fact, pose a danger to them? I'm pretty pro law enforcement, and when it comes to cyber stalking, there's not a lot that law enforcement is going to do with that unless it's really escalated and that's going to come and you're more overt forms of cyber stalking where someone's living a death threat on your social media, or, you know, leaving threats on your doorstep civilly, which is why I'm super excited about this new house bill. There are you could file a civil suit against someone, right? It's a crime that they're committing against you. It's a violation of your privacy. And effective July 1, we actually have some leverage to do something about it, likewise with stalking orders. So I would say, if it's happening, we need to change the culture of this behavior being acceptable, because it's not.

So I want to be pushing everyone talk to an attorney consultancy, what your options are, get a stalking order if you need to. And yeah, maybe we do start calling police, at least creating that paper trail of behavior.

Steve Altishin  21:10  
The kind of takeaway I'm getting is that you can be vigilant, and it can really help. You don't necessarily have to throw your phone away or get off of everything you do, you know, because that sort of feels like it's getting into the cyber stalker.

Jennifer Brissenden  21:30  
It is. And you know what feels wrong. You've already been victimized, and here you are having to change the way that you you do everything, and you know, spending money that you may not have to spend. So there are definitely ways to circumvent it, and one that I didn't mention that I should have is Wi Fi routers. If you don't have Wi Fi routers locked down, someone can can come within the territory of that router and actually kind of backdoor in that way. Yeah. So it can be remedied. It just takes a little bit of time and a little bit of knowledge. But it's worth it. It's worth every second of it.

Steve Altishin  22:09  
What about, what about people you know, and everyone does it. You go to, you go to, you know, Starbucks, you go somewhere, and you join their Wi Fi, because, you know, it's your only option you want to have Wi Fi. How can someone deal people deal with that? I mean, is there? Is that just an inevitable thing to do, or don't do it, or just make sure you're careful what you do when you're doing it?

Jennifer Brissenden  22:37  
I err on the side of caution. Personally, I would say, don't connect. Most wireless plans now are going to have unlimited data, so just turn that Wi Fi off. And yeah, I don't think it's worth it. The various characters sitting in Starbucks next to you trying to, like, hack into your phone because you're connected to Wi Fi, I think is very slim. But is it worth it? I don't think so. 

Steve Altishin  23:02  
It's kind of like, you know, you said sometimes you go on and you see all these, these wi Fi's available, and a lot of them, you know, are locked, but they're somewhat there that aren't, they're still just sort of open, and people can get on them. Yeah, that's a huge thing. I didn't even think about that till you talked about that. Wow, we have zipped through 30 minutes. This was really, really good before we end. Can you let people know if they're interested in learning about this war? Think that maybe a victim just want to make sure they're not or what they do if they are, how they can get ahold of you.

Jennifer Brissenden  23:40  
I welcome phone calls, emails. You can look me up on Google, bristin investigations. All of my contact info is on there. I always too. I think it's important to note I always do free consultations. Consultation doesn't mean I'm going to spend three hours going through all the details of you know your your personal case, but people are more than welcome to call me up and say, Hey, here's what I have going on. Here are some of the programs that I'm concerned about, and I can let them know whether or not I'm able to help them or not. If it's super complex and you're dealing with like the IT Director of Microsoft, he's probably going to be smarter than me or she. So yeah, people can always call and I'm happy to kind of walk through their personal situation.

Steve Altishin  24:30  
Well, I like that, and at least you can tell them like I say, what you don't know that you don't know, just, just areas that they say, God, they never would have thought of that, right? So. Jennifer, thank you so much for being here today. It was, it was very helpful. I think it gets people started to think about the things they should be thinking about.

Jennifer Brissenden  24:55  
100% better safe than sorry. Yeah.

Steve Altishin  24:57  
So thank you so much.

Jennifer Brissenden  24:59  
Thank you.

Steve Altishin  25:00  
I appreciate it, you bet, and everyone else, thank you for joining us today. Of course, if anyone has further questions on today's topic, you can also post it here, as well as getting ahead, getting a hold of Jennifer, or you can call us. We can get you connected to Jennifer and until next time, stay safe, stay happy and be well.

Outro:
This has been Modern Family Matters, a legal podcast focusing on providing real answers and direction for individuals and families. Our podcast is sponsored by Pacific Cascade Legal, serving families in Oregon and Washington. If you are in need of legal counsel or have additional questions about a family law matter important to you, please visit our websites at pacificcascadelegal.com or pacificcascadefamilylaw.com. You can also call our headquarters at (503) 227-0200 to schedule a case evaluation with one of our seasoned attorneys. Modern Family Matters, advocating for your better tomorrow and offering legal solutions important to the modern family.