Cyber experts aren’t surprised that digital footprints enabled FBI investigators to identify Paula Broadwell as the writer of anonymous emails that ignited the General Petraeus crisis.
Kim Zetter of Wired reports on the details.
“Every year careless hackers, cyberstalkers and others are undone by the digital trails they leave behind for law enforcement to collect and trace back to them,” she writes. “But who would have thought the nation’s top spy chief would be undone so easily by digital footprints left behind in e-mail?”
In recent years there have been numerous cases where well-educated, white-collar professionals have been identified as anonymous emailers and posters in a range of Internet situations. Law enforcement officials and the cyber experts who help solve such cases are full of such stories, which often remain out of the news.
IP addresses and other digital footprints make online anonymity more difficult to attain than it appears – especially when public email servers like Google, Yahoo and similar providers are used for their emails. Such sites are easy to hack…which is why leaving emails on servers instead of deleting them is a mistake.
