Recently we were successful in bringing a Dallas case to litigation by using Cyber Intelligence tactics by luring the anonymous poster who was defaming a local law enforcement officer. The case was approached as a usual online sting operation. A person, who thought they were hidden by disguising as Eskimo88, posted some defamatory comments on a site at will. After we were able to interact with Eskimo88 online we were able to extract an IP address and eventually identify the culprit’s true identity, which by the way was a fellow officer.
Like most other Cyber Investigation cases, this is a perfect example of how the combination of Cyber Investigators and legal tactics are used to uncover the real identity of a suspect. The moral to this story was that there is a growing magnitude of people bashing each other anonymously, even at law enforcement levels.
The key piece to this case was the use of a John Doe lawsuit to be able to name the party. Because we were able to acquire the IP address it was then possible to subpoena records which disclosed personal information about the person responsible for the online attacks.
A simple act of defamation can destroy someone’s life, career and livelihood. Stormy and other victims of online defamation and libel are just one of the many thousands of people that get attacked on a daily basis. This story alone should tell you this is a problem that is arising across the world and no one is exempt from the possibility of it happening to them.
