When the Web is not your friend...

            Recently someone in Texas hacked into my bank account and attempted to withdraw a substantial sum of money. Fortunately, the Internet security professionals at Wells Fargo used what I can only describe as an impressive algorithm to detect and stop the fraud before the cash left my account. I spent most of an afternoon on the telephone with these folks and came away from the experience not only chastened, but amazed that this doesn’t happen more often.

            By way of explanation, I am reasonably paranoid about Internet security - that is to say, my own on-line security.  I never use mobile devices to manage any kind of financial transaction.  I only use my home laptop for this purpose and the Wi-Fi is password protected and subject to Norton security software. I regularly use proprietary software to clean out temporary Internet files, cookies, etc. So, imagine my astonishment when Wells Fargo alerted me to the fraudulent attempt to transfer funds out of my account.  Here’s what I learned: with the explosion of on-line shopping and the proliferation of accounts with on-line retailers (especially during the Christmas season!), pop up windows that take the careless user down an unexpected dark path and the widespread use of Google’s search engine, not to mention the appeals from desperate people trying to get money out of Nigeria, Internet fraud is a lot more common than we’d like to think. One inadvertent click on the wrong email or a mistyped web address can send the user down a rabbit hole of spam, viruses and malware.

            It’s the malware that caught me in a “web” (pardon the pun) of trailing consequences that, as I write this column, I am still sorting through. I was fairly certain that the cause of this nightmare of closing accounts, making sure that automatic debits and credits were not interrupted and several trips to the local Wells Fargo branch was to be found in my laptop.  So I took it off to a terrific service called FoothillTek in Sierra Madre (my new best friends) who analyzed the computer and found a variety of viruses and the dreaded malware that caused all the havoc in the first place. In my situation, whatever stray website that I encountered at some point installed the malware on my laptop, which enabled it to “read” the password for my bank account as I typed it on-line.  The rest of this drama played itself out in the way I described earlier.  It turns out that my Norton anti-virus software doesn’t protect against malware; and so FoothillTek installed the appropriate software to guard against future incursions.

            As I chased down the last details of converting over to my new bank accounts, it occurred to me that if someone as cautious as me can be unknowingly dragged through the Looking Glass of Internet fraud, imagine what is in store for La Salle’s teenagers who, like all teenagers, are blissfully ignorant of real world consequences for their poor choices in Life, Love and the Internet. It’s the very definition of a teenager to believe that one is invincible and that bad things only happen to other people. Let’s just be relieved that, when we were teenagers, the Internet didn’t exist and our mistakes thankfully slipped through the cracks of faulty, aging memories. Not so for young people today. Their on-line mistakes never fade with the passage of time.

            At La Salle, we spend a fair amount of time - especially in Mentor Period, -cautioning our students about the dangers of careless use of the Internet. And, when we do, the sound of teenage eyes rolling is almost audible. We talk to them about how to set responsible privacy settings on Facebook accounts. We caution them about posting inappropriate pictures on Instagram and other social media sites. We urge them to resist sharing passwords with friends and, above all, we attempt to strike fear in their hearts when strangers attempt to “friend” them. According to one media source, there are over 83 million fake Facebook accounts. Social Media watchdogs encourage parents to engage in frequent conversations with their teenagers about how they use social media; especially with respect to privacy settings (never publish a birth date that includes the year of birth and always restrict access to personal social media sites to known individuals). Do you know what “catfishing” is?  Neither did I, until Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o endured the humiliation of publicly acknowledging that the tragic death of a “girlfriend” with whom he developed an on-line relationship was a hoax.

Here are some startling statistics:

 

ü  Internet crime is the fastest growing crime in the U.S., and children are the fastest growing victim pool

ü  In the U.S., 95% of schools are now connected to the Internet (as of 2014)

ü  Over 45 million children ages 10 through 17 use the Internet. Among them:

§  One in five has been sexually solicited

§  One in four has encountered unwanted pornography

§  Close to 60% of teens have received an e-mail or instant message from a stranger and half have communicated back

While we all recognize the challenges, pitfalls and dangers of the Internet, we often hope that it won’t affect us - or our children - in any meaningful way. I am one of those who now - painfully - understand that, when it comes to the Internet, hope is not a strategy.