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Tracing the Cybersteps of Your Stalker

Peck starts by logging every event, just as the Herald Leader did. Then he retraces the cybersteps of the perpetrator.

Companies that lack the skill to do this should look for a private detective who's well versed in Internet evidence gathering, suggests Peck.

E-mail is the easiest to track by reading header information, following it back to the Internet Service Provider, and enlisting or subpoenaing the ISP to match evidence with its customer information. To do this, the ISP must compare its logs for connections that coincide with the dates and times the mails were sent to the victim.

In the case of a chat room scenario, in which the attacker pretends to be someone he's not, tracking is a little more difficult because the person calling or mailing the victim has also been duped by the perpetrator who leaves no obvious IP address trail. But even this can be overcome with the help of the ISP.

"As a security analyst, the closest I've dealt with is someone using chat rooms to libel our company on a public message board," Peck says. "But we do have the ability, through 'little brother' probes and proxy servers, to see who went to chat at Yahoo at such and such time on Nov. 9, 1998," he says. "Then we could have used a subpoena to ask who's IP address this post originated from."

Civil or Criminal?

The next step is to get an attorney with some cybersmarts to help determine whether you should seek criminal charges, file a civil suit, or neither, advises Alan Wernick, a partner in the Chicago office and co-chairman of McBride Baker & Coles' intellectual property law department.

"Civil suits are one possible remedy," Wernick says. "If the cyberstalker is tying up company computer resources, then other issues may arise, like denial of use."

In that case, you're looking at a violation of the Computer Crime Act, which federal officials are obliged to look into. So if you want the help of law enforcement, look for activity like fraud or computer crime, or threat of bodily harm, Malinowski suggests.

For the most part, French and Peck follow the civil path because they, like the Herald Leader, can't find law enforcement officers to help them. And, Peck says, sometimes just a call to the perpetrator may be enough to stop the stalking.

Just remember that if you're filing damages in a civil suit, most perpetrators don't have much to lose, Malinowski says. If you know the perpetrator's whereabouts, he advises to instead contact the prosecutor in the perpetrator's jurisdiction. State prosecutors, he says, are currently organizing and gearing up to deal with new cyberstalking laws coming out on a state-by-state basis.

Unfortunately, following this process doesn't guarantee results. The Herald Leader case shows just how difficult it is to stop a cyberstalker, let alone prosecute one.

"We've tracked the IP address to the perpetrator's computer two times. We've gone to the county attorney's office and they won't touch this," says a Herald Leader executive who asked not to be identified. "We've gone to the Lexington Police Department, the state police, even the FBI... What else can we do to get this stopped?"