What Is Swatting? And How Can You Prevent It?

What happens when online harassment crosses the digital divide? For several years now, the practice of swatting has been on the rise, and featured in news stories the world over. What exactly does the practice entail? What are the legal consequences of swatting, and what kind of damage has been inflicted upon those who have fallen victim to it?

With its roots in hacker communities of the 1990s, today, doxxing remains a widespread cybersecurity issue. If anything, the problem is growing. 21% of Americans (more than 43 million individuals) report having personally experienced doxxing. An even greater number, 62%, personally knew someone who had been the victim of a doxxing attack.

Traditional discovery is the initial phase of litigation when all parties are required to provide records and evidence relevant to a specific case. However, thanks to the explosion of electronically stored information (ESI), discovery must now work alongside eDiscovery—a process that involves the identification, preservation, collection, retention, and review of data in an electronic format. This makes the discovery exponentially larger and more complex.

Imagine for a second that you need to collect evidence from someone’s Facebook or Twitter account. Like a surprising number of criminals, the person has just posted something incredibly incriminating that could really help your case. However, there’s also a good chance that they’ll come to their senses and delete the post. The evidence can disappear at any moment—so you need to act quickly.

Ransomware attacks are on the rise, but sophisticated dark web forensics and tools are helping investigators to transform the dark web from a murky and lawless online environment, into a treasure trove of evidence and information. In the 1900s, organised crime was personified by Al Capone, Frank Costello and John Gotti — infamous names that are still known today, even though they operated in a limited geographical area.

Documentation and data in modern business are generated at a rapid pace, both on and offline. A wide variety of industries, such as banking and the financial sector, have to manage thousands of different types of documents regularly. Keeping up with this cumulative documentation can be difficult and costly. A digitized, paperless business means an increase of the office’s organization, work efficiency and more accurate results.

Chain of custody, in a legal context, can refer to both physical and electronic evidence. With the huge increase in the leverage of the latter within litigation cases, today, chain of custody is a key requirement of any eDiscovery process.

Unlike some other eDiscovery processes, a legal hold reaches far beyond your legal department and can potentially impact personnel across your whole business.

Optical character recognition (OCR) offers organizations the opportunity to get a much better digital handle on the information they store.

In a previous article, we discussed the importance of protecting your website content from intellectual property (IP) theft. By keeping a complete archive of your website—including all edits and deletions—it becomes much easier to prove that original content from your site has been stolen by another party.