Is Your College Student Carelessly Inviting Identity Thieves and Predators?

In its annual report earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission announced that the most vulnerable targets of identity theft are 18-29-year olds. Likewise, the 2007 Identity Fraud Survey Report, released by Javelin Strategy & Research, uncovers similar findings: "Adult victims between the ages of 18 and 24 are least likely to take easy, but important, safeguards such as shredding documents and using antivirus software and firewalls, resulting in more than 5 percent of those surveyed falling victim."

And Stephen Knighten, a research associate for Javelin Strategy & Research, adds that residence hall life may increase a student's risk for identity theft: "Oftentimes, you're in a situation where you probably have a roommate and people coming in and out of your apartment � physical documents tend to sort of sit around, and there are more avenues of access with your roommates' friends and your friends."

The Internet Crimes Against Children program last year investigated 2,329 cases of enticement and of predators traveling to meet minors, and 252,000 cases of child pornography. Yet those numbers provide just a glimpse of the activity, since many local police forces are too small to investigate child porn.

"It's absolutely overwhelming," says Brad Russ, director of Internet Crimes Against Children's training and technical assistance program, which trains 1,000 officers each year. "The scope and the scale of the problem far exceeds our capacity." Intensifying the epidemic is that more than half the world has no laws dealing with child pornography.

And what are some of the other careless acts of college students that leave them vulnerable to identity theft? Here are a few of the ways they might be inviting predators, hackers, and other cybercriminals:

* They setup and use an unsecured wireless network. (Hackers love this because it makes their drive-by hacking that much easier. And not only is the student' information stolen, but the hacker may add software to turn the student's computer into a "zombie" computer thereby taking remote control of it. Hint: It only takes a few more moments to create a userid and password for an extra level of protection.)

* They use guests' computers in the business centers of hotels to enter their personal and/or financial information. (The newest trend for hackers is to hack into these computers so that can secretly record every keystroke and commit other crimes using the student's information. Hint: If you use courtesy computers at a hotel, make absolutely sure that you are on a safe and secured line. And, taking it a step further, do not enter any personal and financial information unless it is absolutely necessary and this is your only option. See the related story from ABC News' Good Morning America in the video below.)

* They inhabit social networking sites and let their younger siblings share the site with them. (While social networking sites, like MySpace, and many others, are extremely popular communities where young people innocently engage in countless hours of banal chatter and photo-sharing, unfortunately, these social networking sites have also become the hangouts for child predators, child pornographers, and other cybercriminals. Hint: Putting filtering and monitoring software on kids' computers provides some protection. Parents, use legitimate software to block Web sites and create a log of visited sites. As parents and guardians, you can monitor a child's activity from other computers and be notified of violations via E-mail or cell phone.)

* They quickly and without verifying identities add new "friends" to their instant messenger buddy lists. (While it is rewarding to see your buddy list grow with new friends from around the world, be sure that you absolutely know that the new friend is actually who he says he or she is. Many times predators and cybercriminals (male and female) will hide behind pictures of extremely attractive ladies in sexy poses. Hint: Before adding any new friends to your buddy list, take time to read their profile (which may or may not be completed fully), or do further investigation by visiting their website. An incomplete profile should serve as a red flag and raise you level of suspicion.)

It may take a village to raise a child, but in a world of online social networking, decentralized networks and servers, and increasingly tech-savvy child predators, it's going to take a united effort among government, industry, and families to keep them safe. To protect your child, you need an Internet security team of experts making sure that you, your family, and your business computer are always safe and secure.

The best protection you can have in today's rapidly changing world of cyber-attacks is to have expert support for all your Internet security needs that will provide technical support without any hassles and without charging you extra fees. It will become even more critical than it is today as time goes on. You need to find your own personal team of experts to rely on. If you ever have a security problem, you will want to have a trusted expert you can call for professional help, without any hassles and extra costs!

Remember: When you say "No!" to hackers and spyware, everyone wins! When you don't, we all lose.

� MMVII, Etienne A. Gibbs, MSW, The Internet Safety Advocate and Educator

Related Story: Good Morning America video
Etienne A. Gibbs, Internet Security Advocate and Educator, consults with individuals, small business owners, and home-business entrepreneurs about online protection (including free lifetime technical support and $25K identity theft insurance and recovery) against spyware, viruses, hackers, and other pc-disabling cybercrimes. For more information, visit http://www.SayNotoHackersandSpyware.com/.

Steps You Need to Take to Protect Your Children From Online Predators

Stories of cyber creeps are plenty. Every now and then we come across incidents where questionable people have lured children in to divulging sensitive information to unknown people, of meeting perverts online and getting violated, the list could go on. As a parent, you are surely worried about the acquaintances your children make online. A nameless and faceless cyber world can pose serious threat to those who do not tread on its turf cautiously. If you are complacent, chances are that you will end up in trouble in the cyber world let alone the inexperienced teenagers or your ten year old!

Education is power! Tell your children why it is important to be cautious in the internet. Share with them stories and published guidelines on how to behave in the cyber world. Ask them never to divulge sensitive information like social security numbers, telephone numbers, contact address, etc. to unknown people.

Teach them. Teach them how to behave in the cyber world. Tell them what to do and what not to. Tell them how to talk and what to do in order to avoid unwanted attention. Ask them to follow internet etiquette diligently - this could mean the difference between security and total violation of safety.

Guide them. Sit with them and guide them how to access internet - the messages and language that may lead to questionable situations. Show them the websites that they should stay away from and why. Help them understand the best way to enjoy internet without compromising security and peace of mind.

Prevent them. Often teaching and guidance may not go all the way. In such a situation, use prevention.

o Bar the websites that you think may lead to unwanted situations. Most internet service providers give parental control options. Allow only certain websites and define the websites that you do not want your children to visit. Various anti-virus software also provide the option of blocking websites that may have adult content or are hosted in insecure web locations. Make full use of those features.

o Give them internet time only for a specific period and during specific hours of the day. Do not let them access the internet all the time. Do not share the password for internet connection

o Do not share passwords for areas in your computer that are protected for confidential reasons. Kids do not need to know that. In fact if need be prevent access to all those areas in your computer.

Observe them. Although no child would like their parents sneaking behind their backs, but initially it is a good idea to keep an eye on the websites that your children are regularly visiting. See if there is any website that you think may cause trouble. Discuss with them your concern. Children often understand if they are treated like adults.

Teach your children to enjoy the fruits of technological advances responsibly. As long as you are in a safe and secured environment, you will enjoy your online experience more. Treading on tough, murky areas is neither comfortable nor desirable.

Gregg Hall is an author living on the Emerald Coast of Florida. Now that you know a little more about computer security be sure that you get quality computer accessories by going to http://www.nsearch.com

Are Predators Waiting , Watching, and Engaging on Your Child's Social Networking Sites?

MySpace and other social networking sites offer thriving communities where young people engage in countless hours of banal chatter and photo sharing. Not coincidentally, these social networking sites also have become hangouts for child predators, child pornographers, and other cybercriminals.

To stay one step ahead of authorities, these cybercriminals use tricks to conceal their identities online. One of the most common is lying about their ages, claiming to be younger than they are. And to hide their IP addresses and locations, predators and other cybercriminals often piggyback on Wi-Fi connections or use proxy servers. They use decentralized peer-to-peer networks to prevent material from being tracked to a specific server. They also use encryption to allow them to keep online chats private from those policing the Web. When law enforcement, ISPs, and others take down the websites of these pedophiles, predators, and cybercriminals, it's not long before they're back up, hosted by a different service.

Skillful with their cell phones, instant messaging accounts, and with access to personal computers at home and school, young people are easy targets for sexual predators. Too many of them are ready and willing to share personal information online without a thought to how it might be misused by others. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that one in five kids online has been solicited or enticed. Reports of child pornography on the center's CyberTipline have increased six of the last seven years.

Business and technology professionals may think of online child safety as a family issue, but it's a workplace issue, too. Social networks aren't just a teen phenomenon. A recent survey by Web filtering company, Websense, found that 8% of respondents visit social networking sites while at work. Companies can use Web filters to limit access to the sites, though Websense says its customers don't seem overly concerned. Whiling away company time on social networks is a productivity issue; luring children for sex is a criminal one.

There's little evidence that sexual predators are trolling from workplace personal computers, but it's been known to happen. In 2003, a Cincinnati-area police chief admitted to soliciting sex from someone he thought was a 15-year-old, using his work computer. And a deputy press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, arrested in March for attempting to seduce a child, had his workplace computer seized as part of the investigation and gave the number to his government-issued cell phone to a police office posing as a 14-year-old girl.

Child porn stored on company computers and servers has been a bigger problem. Filtering and blocking can help keep the images off networks, though it's not failsafe. Keyword and URL-based filters have spotty coverage. Other software scans images for limbs and skin tones and blocks pictures it identifies as porn, but skin often takes up too little of the photographs, and innocuous material can be inadvertently blocked.

The Internet Crimes Against Children program last year investigated 2,329 cases of enticement and of predators traveling to meet minors, and 252,000 cases of child pornography. Yet those numbers provide just a glimpse of the activity, since many local police forces are too small to investigate child porn. "It's absolutely overwhelming," says Brad Russ, director of Internet Crimes Against Children's training and technical assistance program, which trains 1,000 officers each year. "The scope and the scale of the problem far exceeds our capacity." Intensifying the epidemic is that more than half the world has no laws dealing with child pornography.

Vigilante groups are fighting back. In January, NBC's Dateline featured a report about one such group, Perverted-Justice.org, which set up a sting that resulted in 51 men being busted in three nights. The group hasn't seen one acquittal from those it's helped bring to justice, and nearly all of its work is done with law enforcement. Yet some in law enforcement are wary of such efforts. "We certainly take any information that anyone has regarding an offender," says Randy Newcomb, an investigator with the New York State Police in Canandaigua, N.Y. However, vigilantes expose themselves to liability for entrapment or possession of child porn and might not properly maintain digital evidence, Newcomb says.

Putting filtering and monitoring software on kids' computers provides some protection. SearchHelp's Sentry line, for example, blocks Web sites based on keywords and creates a log of visited sites. It also lets parents and other guardians monitor a child's activity from other computers. Parents can be notified of violations via E-mail or cell phone. Sentry also monitors IM conversations, using expertise culled from law enforcement to flag phrases commonly used by predators. Any IT pro knows of the limitations of such tools. The filters don't work perfectly, and even if kids post and browse safely, social networking sites present a new set of problems. Profiles on the sites often link to other online information sources, providing the type of data a fixated predator might use to locate a child, such as a school name, says Michelle Collins, a unit director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Investigator Newcomb recently spoke to an auditorium of elementary schoolers in western New York. He asked kids in the audience how many of them had more than 200 friends on their online buddy list--a bunch of hands shot up. Out of those, he asked how many have only friends on that list they can put a face to, and half of the hands remained raised. Finally, he asked if any of the kids had ever gone and met someone they'd got to know online, and a few hands were raised. "That's just totally frightening to me," Newcomb says. "The superintendent looked like his eyes were going to pop out of his head." It may take a village to raise a child, but in a world of online social networking, decentralized networks and servers, and increasingly tech-savvy child predators, it's going to take a united effort among government, industry, and families to keep them safe. To protect your child, you need an Internet security team of experts making sure that you, your family, and your business computer are always safe and secure.

The best protection you can have in today's rapidly changing world of cyber-attacks is to have expert support for all your Internet security needs that will provide technical support without any hassles and without charging you extra fees. It will become even more critical than it is today as time goes on. You need to find your own personal team of experts to rely on. If you ever have a security problem, you will want to have a trusted expert you can call for professional help, without any hassles and extra costs!

Remember: When you say "No!" to hackers and spyware, everyone wins! When you don't, we all lose.

Etienne A. Gibbs, Internet Safety Advocate, recommends to individuals and small business owners the protection (including free lifetime technical support and $25,000 identity theft insurance and recovery) package he uses. For more information, visit http://www.SayNotoHackersandSpyware.com/.

Online Predators - How to Protect Your Children on the Internet

Online communication is an important aspect of the Internet.

Online communication can be established on the web by various tools, all falling under the generic name - social software.

Social software covers a range of software and technologies used by Internet users to interact with each other. It covers different means of online communication techniques such as text messaging, voice communication and video in diverse Internet environments. Social software includes: email, IM (=Instant Message), P2P (=Peer-to-Peer networks), newsgroups, chatrooms, forums, blogs, social network services, virtual worlds etc.

When you use online communication you have the ability to choose how you want to present yourself in a specific situation. Online communication allows you to be open about who you are, be anonymous or make up a new persona. This aspect has a major affect on the authenticity of online relationships.

Anonymous online communication holds serious risk factors for children. They can easily become victims of abuse by individuals communicating with them due to lack of mature judgment skills. Sometimes they are not able to interpret the nature of the relationship correctly and can be misled, bullied, abused or fall victim to scams and ploys.

Child predators take advantage of the anonymity in online communication and target unsuspecting children usually for sexual or other abusive purposes.

In order for parents to protect their children from such predators, they should become involved in their children's web activities and learn how to recognize a problematic online relationship.

How Do Child Predators Work?

Child predators use the anonymous nature of online communication in order to contact children and gradually seduce them into an online relationship. This relationship might end in sexual abuse.

They use various forms of online communication, such as, IM, chatrooms, forums, newsgroups, and virtual worlds to target potential victims.

Child predators invest a lot of effort in targeting and seducing children into a relationship. They often pose as children. They are knowledgeable in children's popular hobbies and interests. They seduce children by giving them attention, affection, understanding, kindness and sometimes gifts. They try to target vulnerable kids who crave for attention and affection.

Who Is Vulnerable?

All children that use the Internet are at risk. It is more likely that children will be exposed to unsuitable material than encounter an online predator, but the outcome of such encounters is so severe that parents can not be indifferent to this issue. Although all children are at risk, young adolescents are the most vulnerable age group due to the specific characteristics of this age group. Children in this age group usually have good technological and language abilities that allow them to surf freely without adult help. They are frequent users of social software such as, IM (=Instant Message) , P2P (=Peer-to-Peer networks), social network services and newsgroups.

On the other hand, they lack the maturity and experience to help them understand the content that they encounter when surfing. They can easily misinterpret an online relationship, especially one which engages an adult with ulterior motives.

-They want to be free of their parents' control and to gain respect as grown-ups.

-They explore their sexuality and have the desire to socialize.

-They are in the rebellious phase of their lives and try to establish relationships outside the family. Child predators are well aware of these facts and exploit them.

Victims of child predators might be:


Seeking attention and affection.
New on the Internet scene and unaware of web ethics.
Lacking in social skills in the real world.
Unpopular in their social circle.
Rebellious.
Confused regarding their sexual identity.
Na�ve and unsophisticated in comparison to their age group.

What Can Parents Do to Protect Their Children?


Show an interest in your children's Internet activities. Nothing can be as effective as good communication when discussing means to protect them in the cyber world. Don't be judgmental. Try to understand their experiences and understand their frustration expressed against your efforts to manage their Internet use.
Be a role model. Direct your children to appropriate websites that could be of interest to them. Teach your children web ethics and explain to them about the threats exist on the Internet.
Become Internet savvy. If you have knowledge about services and applications that are available on the Internet, you will be more effective when guiding your children.
Supervise your children when they use the Internet. If you have young children, make sure that the PC they are using is in a family space.
Define clear guidelines for your children for Internet use. You can define an Internet use policy. Place the use policy near the PC that they use to keep the rules visible at all times.
Much in the same way you educate your children not to talk to strangers in the real world, educate them not to communicate with strangers online. Instruct your children not to answer IM or emails from people they don't know.
Young children should not use social software such as: chatrooms, IM, newsgroups, forums and so on. The risks far outweigh the benefits. As for young adolescents and adolescents, make sure that they only use monitored children's chatrooms, newsgroups or forums. Instruct your children never to leave the public chatroom area. (Chatrooms usually offer the option of a private chat were the conversation is not monitored and can not be seen by others).
Don't allow your children to meet with Internet friends in person without your approval and supervision.
Don't allow your children to use a private email account. Let them use the family account or an alias you have created for them in order for you to monitor the incoming and outgoing emails.
Help your children to create a safe username or nickname in the social software tools that they use. A safe username/nickname should not reveal personal information, gender or age.
If your children use the Internet in unsupervised places such as, libraries, school or friends' houses, check the security measures that are enforced at these places.
Instruct your children never to give away personal information online without your approval.
Instruct your children not to upload personal photos to the web without your approval.
Instruct your children not to accept photos or files from strangers without your approval.
Encourage your children to let you know if they encounter any strange behavior or behavior that caused them an uncomfortable feeling. Instruct them on what to do if they encounter such behavior. For example, turning off the PC and notifying a parent.

How Can You Recognize If Your Child Was Targeted By an Online Predator?

Your child may:


Withdraw from family and friends.
Seem depressed and moody.
Be aggressive towards members of the family. Child predators try to emphasize problems that the child has at home which can cause an aggressive behavior.
Spend a lot of time online, especially in chatrooms.
Have pornography on the computer. Child predators often send pornography to children.
Try to hide his/her Internet activities from you. For example, Opens a private email account, hides the computer screen or shuts down the PC when adult approaches.
Spend a lot of time on the Internet at friends' houses in order to avoid your supervision.
Receive presents from people you don't know.
Receive emails from people you don't know.
Receive phone calls from people you don't know. Child predators sometimes try to seduce children to engage in phone sex.

If you have suspicions, don't hesitate to confront your child about it.

Emphasize again the guidelines for safe web surfing to your child.

You can also monitor your child Internet activities by using Internet Parental Control software.

If you choose to do so without the child's knowledge, be aware that it can result in a loss of trust between you and your child.

If all the safety measures you have tried don't work and you find out that your child is a victim of a child predator or in initial contact with one, the most important thing is not to blame the child. Always remember that the blame is on the offender.

Immediately contact -


Your local law-enforcement agency.
CyberTipline 1-800-843-5678 - This tipline is managed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which has representatives from the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service (USCS), and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at its headquarters. You can report incidents of child sexual exploitation, including child pornography, online enticement of children for sexual acts, child prostitution, child-sex tourism, and child sexual molestation.

For more information on how to protect your children in the cyber world see - http://www.in3go.com - Internet Security Information

Are Predators Waiting , Watching, and Engaging on Your Child's Social Networking Sites?

MySpace and other social networking sites offer thriving communities where young people engage in countless hours of banal chatter and photo sharing. Not coincidentally, these social networking sites also have become hangouts for child predators, child pornographers, and other cybercriminals.

To stay one step ahead of authorities, these cybercriminals use tricks to conceal their identities online. One of the most common is lying about their ages, claiming to be younger than they are. And to hide their IP addresses and locations, predators and other cybercriminals often piggyback on Wi-Fi connections or use proxy servers. They use decentralized peer-to-peer networks to prevent material from being tracked to a specific server. They also use encryption to allow them to keep online chats private from those policing the Web. When law enforcement, ISPs, and others take down the websites of these pedophiles, predators, and cybercriminals, it's not long before they're back up, hosted by a different service.

Skillful with their cell phones, instant messaging accounts, and with access to personal computers at home and school, young people are easy targets for sexual predators. Too many of them are ready and willing to share personal information online without a thought to how it might be misused by others. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that one in five kids online has been solicited or enticed. Reports of child pornography on the center's CyberTipline have increased six of the last seven years.

Business and technology professionals may think of online child safety as a family issue, but it's a workplace issue, too. Social networks aren't just a teen phenomenon. A recent survey by Web filtering company, Websense, found that 8% of respondents visit social networking sites while at work. Companies can use Web filters to limit access to the sites, though Websense says its customers don't seem overly concerned. Whiling away company time on social networks is a productivity issue; luring children for sex is a criminal one.

There's little evidence that sexual predators are trolling from workplace personal computers, but it's been known to happen. In 2003, a Cincinnati-area police chief admitted to soliciting sex from someone he thought was a 15-year-old, using his work computer. And a deputy press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, arrested in March for attempting to seduce a child, had his workplace computer seized as part of the investigation and gave the number to his government-issued cell phone to a police office posing as a 14-year-old girl.

Child porn stored on company computers and servers has been a bigger problem. Filtering and blocking can help keep the images off networks, though it's not failsafe. Keyword and URL-based filters have spotty coverage. Other software scans images for limbs and skin tones and blocks pictures it identifies as porn, but skin often takes up too little of the photographs, and innocuous material can be inadvertently blocked.

The Internet Crimes Against Children program last year investigated 2,329 cases of enticement and of predators traveling to meet minors, and 252,000 cases of child pornography. Yet those numbers provide just a glimpse of the activity, since many local police forces are too small to investigate child porn. "It's absolutely overwhelming," says Brad Russ, director of Internet Crimes Against Children's training and technical assistance program, which trains 1,000 officers each year. "The scope and the scale of the problem far exceeds our capacity." Intensifying the epidemic is that more than half the world has no laws dealing with child pornography.

Vigilante groups are fighting back. In January, NBC's Dateline featured a report about one such group, Perverted-Justice.org, which set up a sting that resulted in 51 men being busted in three nights. The group hasn't seen one acquittal from those it's helped bring to justice, and nearly all of its work is done with law enforcement. Yet some in law enforcement are wary of such efforts. "We certainly take any information that anyone has regarding an offender," says Randy Newcomb, an investigator with the New York State Police in Canandaigua, N.Y. However, vigilantes expose themselves to liability for entrapment or possession of child porn and might not properly maintain digital evidence, Newcomb says.

Putting filtering and monitoring software on kids' computers provides some protection. SearchHelp's Sentry line, for example, blocks Web sites based on keywords and creates a log of visited sites. It also lets parents and other guardians monitor a child's activity from other computers. Parents can be notified of violations via E-mail or cell phone. Sentry also monitors IM conversations, using expertise culled from law enforcement to flag phrases commonly used by predators. Any IT pro knows of the limitations of such tools. The filters don't work perfectly, and even if kids post and browse safely, social networking sites present a new set of problems. Profiles on the sites often link to other online information sources, providing the type of data a fixated predator might use to locate a child, such as a school name, says Michelle Collins, a unit director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Investigator Newcomb recently spoke to an auditorium of elementary schoolers in western New York. He asked kids in the audience how many of them had more than 200 friends on their online buddy list--a bunch of hands shot up. Out of those, he asked how many have only friends on that list they can put a face to, and half of the hands remained raised. Finally, he asked if any of the kids had ever gone and met someone they'd got to know online, and a few hands were raised. "That's just totally frightening to me," Newcomb says. "The superintendent looked like his eyes were going to pop out of his head." It may take a village to raise a child, but in a world of online social networking, decentralized networks and servers, and increasingly tech-savvy child predators, it's going to take a united effort among government, industry, and families to keep them safe. To protect your child, you need an Internet security team of experts making sure that you, your family, and your business computer are always safe and secure.

The best protection you can have in today's rapidly changing world of cyber-attacks is to have expert support for all your Internet security needs that will provide technical support without any hassles and without charging you extra fees. It will become even more critical than it is today as time goes on. You need to find your own personal team of experts to rely on. If you ever have a security problem, you will want to have a trusted expert you can call for professional help, without any hassles and extra costs!

Remember: When you say "No!" to hackers and spyware, everyone wins! When you don't, we all lose.

Etienne A. Gibbs, Internet Safety Advocate, recommends to individuals and small business owners the protection (including free lifetime technical support and $25,000 identity theft insurance and recovery) package he uses. For more information, visit http://www.SayNotoHackersandSpyware.com/.

Is Your College Student Carelessly Inviting Identity Thieves and Predators?

In its annual report earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission announced that the most vulnerable targets of identity theft are 18-29-year olds. Likewise, the 2007 Identity Fraud Survey Report, released by Javelin Strategy & Research, uncovers similar findings: "Adult victims between the ages of 18 and 24 are least likely to take easy, but important, safeguards such as shredding documents and using antivirus software and firewalls, resulting in more than 5 percent of those surveyed falling victim."

And Stephen Knighten, a research associate for Javelin Strategy & Research, adds that residence hall life may increase a student's risk for identity theft: "Oftentimes, you're in a situation where you probably have a roommate and people coming in and out of your apartment � physical documents tend to sort of sit around, and there are more avenues of access with your roommates' friends and your friends."

The Internet Crimes Against Children program last year investigated 2,329 cases of enticement and of predators traveling to meet minors, and 252,000 cases of child pornography. Yet those numbers provide just a glimpse of the activity, since many local police forces are too small to investigate child porn.

"It's absolutely overwhelming," says Brad Russ, director of Internet Crimes Against Children's training and technical assistance program, which trains 1,000 officers each year. "The scope and the scale of the problem far exceeds our capacity." Intensifying the epidemic is that more than half the world has no laws dealing with child pornography.

And what are some of the other careless acts of college students that leave them vulnerable to identity theft? Here are a few of the ways they might be inviting predators, hackers, and other cybercriminals:

* They setup and use an unsecured wireless network. (Hackers love this because it makes their drive-by hacking that much easier. And not only is the student' information stolen, but the hacker may add software to turn the student's computer into a "zombie" computer thereby taking remote control of it. Hint: It only takes a few more moments to create a userid and password for an extra level of protection.)

* They use guests' computers in the business centers of hotels to enter their personal and/or financial information. (The newest trend for hackers is to hack into these computers so that can secretly record every keystroke and commit other crimes using the student's information. Hint: If you use courtesy computers at a hotel, make absolutely sure that you are on a safe and secured line. And, taking it a step further, do not enter any personal and financial information unless it is absolutely necessary and this is your only option. See the related story from ABC News' Good Morning America in the video below.)

* They inhabit social networking sites and let their younger siblings share the site with them. (While social networking sites, like MySpace, and many others, are extremely popular communities where young people innocently engage in countless hours of banal chatter and photo-sharing, unfortunately, these social networking sites have also become the hangouts for child predators, child pornographers, and other cybercriminals. Hint: Putting filtering and monitoring software on kids' computers provides some protection. Parents, use legitimate software to block Web sites and create a log of visited sites. As parents and guardians, you can monitor a child's activity from other computers and be notified of violations via E-mail or cell phone.)

* They quickly and without verifying identities add new "friends" to their instant messenger buddy lists. (While it is rewarding to see your buddy list grow with new friends from around the world, be sure that you absolutely know that the new friend is actually who he says he or she is. Many times predators and cybercriminals (male and female) will hide behind pictures of extremely attractive ladies in sexy poses. Hint: Before adding any new friends to your buddy list, take time to read their profile (which may or may not be completed fully), or do further investigation by visiting their website. An incomplete profile should serve as a red flag and raise you level of suspicion.)

It may take a village to raise a child, but in a world of online social networking, decentralized networks and servers, and increasingly tech-savvy child predators, it's going to take a united effort among government, industry, and families to keep them safe. To protect your child, you need an Internet security team of experts making sure that you, your family, and your business computer are always safe and secure.

The best protection you can have in today's rapidly changing world of cyber-attacks is to have expert support for all your Internet security needs that will provide technical support without any hassles and without charging you extra fees. It will become even more critical than it is today as time goes on. You need to find your own personal team of experts to rely on. If you ever have a security problem, you will want to have a trusted expert you can call for professional help, without any hassles and extra costs!

Remember: When you say "No!" to hackers and spyware, everyone wins! When you don't, we all lose.

� MMVII, Etienne A. Gibbs, MSW, The Internet Safety Advocate and Educator

Related Story: Good Morning America video
Etienne A. Gibbs, Internet Security Advocate and Educator, consults with individuals, small business owners, and home-business entrepreneurs about online protection (including free lifetime technical support and $25K identity theft insurance and recovery) against spyware, viruses, hackers, and other pc-disabling cybercrimes. For more information, visit http://www.SayNotoHackersandSpyware.com/.