Protect yourself from cyber nightmare

It was anyone’s worst nightmare.

A married couple, enjoying a quiet evening at home, opened the door innocently and found themselves facing a squad of federal agents and local law officers brandishing threats and allegations — none of which were accurate or true — about the couple’s supposed involvement in a nefarious crime.

That was bad enough. The couple was of course terrified by what they were going through — knowing they were innocent, but not knowing how they could prove it. But what happened next was even worse.

Several newspapers (not this one, or any other local ones) got ahold of the federal search warrant alleging possession of child pornography and published a story that named names and didn’t ascertain that the couple had indeed been determined to themselves be innocent victims of yet another serious crime — cyber identity theft.

It turns out that someone — possibly a worker who had visited the home — had stolen the couple’s Internet Protocol address, and thus was able to disguise the actual location where child pornography was being viewed and downloaded online. Authorities had followed the trail to the Kalispell couple’s home, but quickly discovered the real culprit was somewhere else.

The truth hasn’t been determined yet, but there are lessons to be learned for all of us to make sure we avoid winding up in the same position.

A story in today’s Inter Lake provides advice and insight from computer experts about how to protect your online identity from being stolen.

“This is a situation where people should definitely secure their wireless router to ensure that nobody else steals their Internet,” and consequently results in them becoming “a victim of a search warrant that they had nothing to do with,” said Carl Rusnok of Homeland Security.

Unfortunately, there are bad guys out there — lots of them — and the rest of us have to take precautions to make sure we aren’t their next victims.