With blogging and other internet-related businesses on the rise in this downturn economy, it has become increasingly important for entrepreneurs to protect their creative output. But merely adding a copyright is not enough. Thieves, desperate for cash or attention, will erect cheap sites on inexpensive or free hosting servers and drain honest website proprietors of their intellectual property by stealing content directly from publisher’s sites through rss feeds and hacking into the back end of a publisher’s server.
There are web programmers, accessories to theft, that will show a crime-hungry villain just how to hack into a publisher’s website. Often, these programmers will show thieves how to cloak or change their user agents to impersonate a reputable company such as Google or Mozilla. Programmers will even show users how to ignore robot.txt so that they don’t have to impersonate Google. Interestingly, the thieves who often use these tricks appear to be very organized and well-monied, often working within large blocks of ip addresses.
Cyber-crimes can include hacking, scraping, duplicate sites, cloaking, redirecting links, black hat seo, password trafficking, internet fraud and spam, internet harassment, copyright piracy and infringement, impersonation of person or website, misleading or misrepresenting a link as belonging to another website, theft of trade secrets, and more.
If you believe you are the of a cyber-crime, there are a number of things you can do. After documenting the crime by copying, in paper and electronic format, IP addresses and data contained in your server’s event logs, you should contact the sites themselves, hosting companies used by the sites, any search engines listing the site, and most importantly the Federal government.
The Department of Justice, through its Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section, has information about how to report the attack. Go to www.cybercrime.gov for more information on how to report a cyber-crime. There, you will find a list of agencies to report your crime to, by internet, phone, or mail. You should also contact the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), www.ic3.gov, a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C),
and the Bureau of Justice Assistance
(BJA).