Law Enforcement and Social Media

It’s common knowledge that most criminals aren’t the smartest people around.  Many of them are so proud of their crimes that they feel the need to tell people about them.  This has happened a lot in the past, but now, that just about everyone has at least one social media account, the criminals now have a wider audience they can brag to.  Before social media, it took a while for word to spread about how “George” burglarized 10 houses in one night.  Now, with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the word can go out immediately to thousands of people. 

 

While spreading the word mouth-to-mouth took a while, it also took the police to catch up with these criminals.  Social media, along with the egos of criminals, has now made arresting some of these crooks a quick, simple process.  Things go a lot quicker for the police when criminals are posting about their crimes on Facebook and Twitter, posting pictures of their “haul” on Instagram and even posting videos of the crime, as it’s happening, on YouTube. Like I said, criminals aren’t the smartest people around.

 

While criminals have long discovered that bragging about crimes they commit on social media lets people know how “bad” they are, the police are now discovering how to use Pinterest as a means to catch criminals.  In Redwood City, California, police have used Pinterest to post photos of items recovered from arrests in order to return them to their rightful owners.  Detective Dave Stahler had success using Pinterest in February when he posted a picture of a family heirloom that was recovered among other stolen jewelry.  Three users called in tips within a few hours of the post going up.

In Richmond, Virginia, police have used Pinterest to solve murder cases and a town in Pennsylvania set up a Pinterest board to post mug shots.  Arrests for theft, sexual assault and fraud have seen a 57% increase since this board was set up.  Hopefully, more towns will see the usefulness of this and begin their own mug shot boards.

Is Your Baby Monitor Safe?

As if new parents didn’t have enough to worry about, now they have to worry about hackers taking over their baby monitors.  In August of 2013, Marc Gilbert, a father in Texas ran to his daughter Allyson’s room when he heard a voice saying, “Wake up, you little slut”.  When he got to the room, he realized that someone hacked the baby monitor, took control of the camera and was watching his little girl.  When he went to unplug the camera, he watched as it turned to see what he was doing.  Little Allyson slept through the incident, but Mr. Gilbert made sure that he had tighter security and firewalls installed on both the monitor and his Internet.

The baby monitor used by the Gilberts was made by Foscam and connected to the Internet.  This particular monitor was known to have security issues, but since they didn’t buy the monitor directly from Foscam, they never received the company’s email regarding an available update that corrected the problem.  As of today, there are estimated to be another 40,000 monitors that can still be hacked.

Just recently, a hacker found one of those monitors in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In April 2014, Adam and Heather Schreck woke up to the sound of someone yelling, “Wake up, baby!”, coming from their 10 month old daughter’s room.  The parents rushed to the room and were horrified when they realized the voice was coming from their baby monitor!  The monitor’s camera started moving and pointed right at them while the person on the other end of the monitor continued to yell obscenities at them and the baby. 

 

This could be the same person who hacked the Gilbert’s baby monitor in Texas or it could be a copycat, but they will never know.  In order to remove the threat, the Schrecks quickly unplugged the baby monitor.  Marc Gilbert also unplugged his daughter’s monitor.  Unfortunately, by doing this, all information stored in the monitor, including the log of IP addresses that accessed it, are erased, making it impossible for the police to trace who is responsible.