Tag: digijaks

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Reputation Control. Who Controls Your Cyber Reputation?

Every day we hear of more stories of people’s Reputation getting smashed instantly online. On a personal level it just plain sucks, and causes mounds of heartache, headache, paperwork, and costs. To a business or a brand, there are risk mitigation and compliance issues, trademark defense costs, and reputations getting taken down, despite having been built up over years or decades.

It could be any trigger. Even, a mistaken identity or you share the same name as someone who gets in trouble.

Or it could be malicious from criminals, or cyber hackers looking to steal your identity, or file false tax returns to claim fake refunds, or to make it appear you were the one who did something when in reality it was someone pretending to be you.

The problem is multifaceted in that it can come from almost any angle, and happen at any time relatively instantly thanks to the linkages that exist between content, social media and search. Digijaks’ CEO has written about this triangulation before as it relates to cyber security and how we all need to look at the this inter-relationship, and it’s effects on all of us.

It is extremely important to understand that your real life – offline, not digital experiences now can and will be instantly transmitted by others, with or without your knowledge and with or without your consent.The little every day things, from getting coffee to getting dressed, to private conversations between two people are suddenly potential fodder for instant intent smearing, reputation trashing and persistent online harassment. Just because someone else had a smartphone on.

This is without writing harsh or bad emails, or saying inappropriate things, or doing illegal or immoral things. The above is just for the regular people who now find themselves in the daily potential trap of someone else deciding to make an internet mockery of them. Just Because. But then, there are the people who are out there willingly doing things to disrupt their families, their businesses, and themselves. There is an entire group of people doing these things every day, hoping no one will post their baggage online and trash them. Some even think it can never happen to them. They are above recrimination or above being outed for whatever proclivities they engage in.

Digijaks offers boutique solutions for high impact individuals, brands and organizations to deal with the combination of cyber security, social media and reputation management and control. We see and hear all kinds of stories. Those from people who are completely innocent and just get caught up in something a bad person did. Those from people who admit to making mistakes and now are working to try to fix the damage or prevent it from happening. Then there are those who just think things will never catch up to them. But they do.

The reality is, the ability to trash reputations, for others to *control your reputation* is all too real. Whether you like it or not.

Reputation Control and Reputation Management
Cyber Security, Social Media, You.
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Cyber Reputation Management and Control

BAM!  There it is.

Right in your face one morning when you check your social feed as news.

That nasty little something that someone, a bot, or a person, or maybe both left for you overnight. It is a digital take down. A bad blog post. A social media meme that is being unanswered or purposely pumped up to discredit you, your company or organization or your brand. Or maybe it is a false allegation. Or paid fake bad reviews that your competitors put up.

Face it. The Internet is a hostile place for your reputation and your brand, whether that is personal, corporate or government. The control and management of your reputation start and end with you. As we enter 2015, it is worth paying attention to, in fact it is important to take stock of your online reputation, the management of it and the control of it. It is yours. Not anyone else.

The — Internet, social media, the cloud, mobility, bring your own device, artificial intelligence, autonomous computing etc etc — all are really cool buzz words. All come with prices to pay that include the constant need for personal, corporate and government level cyber security, reputation management and reputation control.

Our top 10 List of Ways That Cyber Security, Social Media and Reputation Management and Reputation Control all mesh together.

  1. Social Media — is the entrance point for viruses, malware, malformed links, phishing and learning enough about someone to turn around and destroy their reputation.
  2. Mobility — allows for instant access to social media, email, sms, cloud and phone, and video, as ways to tear down a brand or reputation. It can happen anywhere, at any time, by anyone around you holding a smartphone or smart watch or smart glasses.
  3. Cloud — allows people to store information quickly and easily. This can be for phishing, for cyber crime, for reputation destroying or extortion. Images and videos, poems and documents and your complete online profile can be easily harvested by smart people and or bots and then turned around against you. What information are you allowing out or putting out to make it easier to be attacked? Or easier to have your reputation tarnished or that of your brand?
  4. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) — While fun and easy for users and your employees BYOD brings a whole fruit basket worth of cyber security and reputation management and control issues along with it. BYOD allows users and employees to access the internet and social media channels without approval or notice from the employer. A reputation can be destroyed in an instant with a recorded conversation, a video, an errant email or sms, or worse corporate espionage and cyber crimes can be instituted easily with BYOD.
  5. Artificial Intelligence — The name alone. What does it mean? How can artificial intelligence (AI) bots or autonomous computing affect your cyber security and reputation management and control? In so many ways we are just beginning to understand.
  6. Lazy People — Sorry but many times the malware or the phishing or the destruction of reputation starts with someone simply being lazy, not having security and privacy settings attended to, and or worse letting someone else use their login credentials.
  7. Your Competition — They have access to the same tools you do. They can buy hackers, they can buy reputation destruction; they can attempt to steal your trade secrets; they will try to insert bad people into your organization at every level. (See 8 below.)
  8. Bad People — No good, no ethos or morals. These people do not care if they harm you. They seek to. These come in the form of social media contacts or email phishing all the way through HR, interviewing, shadowy financiers and content theft propagators from online goods. They will use any and every tool out there to disrupt your business, to destroy your reputation.
  9. Posting stupid pictures of yourself — on to any website regardless of how safe you *THINK* it is.
  10. Not checking the health and welfare of your own digital reputation and brand.

Copyright © 2010-2015 Digijaks, LLC

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#cybersecurity The Gift everyone needs for the Holidays!

Happy Holidays.

It is, as is so commonly mentioned in the media: “That Time of Year Again.” Yup. Packages. Shiny New Things. Cool Toys for the Kids and kid-adults alike.

It is also the time of year of increased cyber crime attempts aimed at retailers.

Add also the time of year when more families and organizations introduce new varieties of malware, ad-malware, viruses, worms, bad bots and devices that phone “home” into our homes, workplaces and civic spaces.

How? Because many devices are coming pre-loaded with malware. How many parents look into the workings of a cheap tablet before handing it off to the kids? How many people are checking new apps to see the permissions being requested on those new devices and old ones too?

How many companies are not checking to see if their employee’s new devices are safe to be brought into the workplace, let alone to be allowed access to networks? 

Do you know what your connected devices are doing this holiday season? Perhaps it is not just calling the North Pole, but indeed calling “home” with your life information. This applies to talking teddy bears, connected fridges, Iot devices of every stripe, but not to mention your phone, tablet, smartwatch, car.

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#IoT Security Is Just Not.

A few weeks ago I wrote this piece about #IOT Cybersecurity and how it affects personal and brand reputations. I got a lot of criticism for basically speaking the truth. I appreciate all the tweets, emails and Linkedin posts engaging on this piece, including all the people who attempted to say I was wrong.

But the points raised in that piece are simply the opening salvo in a multi front disruption. The disruption is NOT IoT. The disruption is to switch from product leading first with security as an afterthought in the rush to go to market. What needs to change is the mindset to build in design security from the beginning,

Last week I sat on a panel at the California Cyber Security Task Force meeting. The panelists were all cybersecurity experts, from across the field, including homeland security, penetration testers, strategy and policy. When it came time to talk about #IOT Internet of Things, we were all asked what people thought about the current state of cybersecurity in IoT.

The answer from the entire panel was: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CYBERSECURITY AS OF YET IN THE INTERNET OF THINGS.

Think about that for a second. Or maybe longer. Sure there are a few Iot devices that do offer some level of security. But often, as was raised by one of the other panelists, that is simply writing a marketing statement to the effect of “We take your security very seriously.”

But most IoT devices do not provide any real security, and many are simply copies off other IoT devices that also have no security. Then you have to add in the problem of the unsecured devices talking and sending your data to other non secure devices and or third party companies.

The disruption has to be the switch from rush to market with little to no thought about security — to one where security is built in from the design level up and where devices are not put on the market without first being hack tested every which way to be able to prove their security credentials. Otherwise, we are all simply at very real risk. In part because of the inattention or even stupidity of others who do not think this is important; or in the rush to market skip cybersecurity completely — or just write a lame #fail marketing statement about how they value your security.

Because. Not.

Alan W. Silberberg, CEO of DIGIJAKS

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Reputation Control for Kids by Social Media, Search Results

Reputation Control and Reputation Management

In Digijaks daily course of business with reputation management we come across a lot of people (adults) who have seen their life get turned upside down because of something appearing in search results that negatively affect them. This happens so much, and so often it has created a whole industry to deal with it. Search results leading to problems to people happen for many reasons. I recently wrote about this problem on the Huffington Post as it relates to adults.

But this same correlation exists for kids, for families and the same problems may arise, but with lifelong implications. Imagine being an 11 year old who innocently posts a picture or a quote or a poem or a location, thinking nothing of it. Fast forward 6 years to college applications. You can be very sure college admissions officers are carefully looking at social media, at search engine results and other digital mediums to find reasons to say no. The same is true for private high schools; and employers, the military and many others.

We all need to work with our kids to help them understand the direct linkage between social media use and search results that can and will last a lifetime. This affects a lifetime of Reputation Management and Reputation Control efforts that need to start at a young age.

Basic steps:

  1. Have a family discussion, and make it more than one time; about the critical relationship between posts on social media, search results and your children’s future.
  2. Be constantly on the lookout for pictures, quotes, links to offensive material and other social media faux paus that might be innocent in nature but can lead to lifelong difficulties.
  3. Set up Google Alerts in your family’s name, your name, and your kids name. This will alert you when posts from social media land in search results, and also when other websites pick up that material.
  4. Set up a family social media plan that includes rules and guidelines for what your family feels is appropriate, ethical or morally ok to be posted onto the internet.
  5. Remember that nothing that gets posted on the Internet is only in one place. Once posted, it will be replicated on multiple servers, and therefore can keep coming back in search results even if the original post is taken down.
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Cybersecurity: Now the Crossover from Cyber to Real Life

Reputation Control and Reputation Management
Cyber Security, Social Media, You.

Cybersecurity used to be be the geek’s eagle’s nest. it was hard to understand, hard to get to, hard to see the impact and need often times. If there was a CIO or CISO, he/she would not be in the board room too often, and usually the budgets were the first to go in any budget change environment. But the cycle switched. Now we are in the opposite cycle. The CIO and CISO are ruling the roost and commanding serious budgets and attention. But being missed in all the excitement is this:

The Crossover from pure cyber crime to real world crime from the same instance.

It is safe to say, times have changed. Now – Cybersecurity has become a word known in almost any home where there is digital connectivity. Time and time again, we are offered proof that cybersecurity now encompasses reputation management; active control of search and social media as well as the traditional hardening of data access points, transport points, and login authorities. Cybersecurity itself has become such a buzzword that it threatens to create a numbness for people hearing it and responding to it.

Recently Digijaks has worked with multiple clients who have faced the crossover from Cyber Security to Real Life Security. It is our recent experience that shows us that law enforcement is *mostly* unprepared for cyber crossover attacks and does not yet have the substantial depth of understanding of the relationship between social media, cyber security and real life people.

The connections are impossible to overlook. What starts as a cyber threat, like impersonation of another; brand or trademark attacks, social media memes and fake social media sock puppet accounts — can now easily and does easily cross over into real world crimes.

The real world crimes escalate too, often in parallel with online escalation. In our recent experience in dealing with the crossover, most law enforcement agencies of *all levels* are simply not prepared to cope with this reality, and have few to zero people in place who are trained investigators and can assist the public, or corporations or utilities or governments with cyber cross overs.

Digijaks CEO Alan W. Silberberg is advising both the company’s clients and law enforcement agencies to take these “cyber cross over” events seriously. There is growing evidence amounting that shows that real world crimes are becoming easier in some ways and can be facilitated through initial cyber intrusions, whether phishing, trolling or direct digital attacks.

This is leading people who were previously *only* cyber criminals or terrorists to become real world ones too, often at little to no monetary cost. We see this a true emerging threat, as yet mostly being unaddressed either at the Federal or State levels, and a threat that is most acutely faced in local communities who very definitely are not prepared.

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What the Hack of the US Government Means to You.

As the CEO of a cyber security and reputation company, I have to admit to not being surprised by the recent successful hacking and penetration of the US Government.

While the scope of the recent events is most definitely shocking, myself and others have been researching, writing about it and trying to push and pull officials to focus on the whole set of threats, not just the known ones, and not just the data hardening ones.

This recent set of hacking and penetration successes were definitely done by a Nation State, China in most probability. But guess what?

The intrusion was apparently found by a Vendor doing a sales pitch to the US Government, and not by the billions of dollars of hardened equipment or custom platforms designed to stop cyber attacks.

I am not being critical. Nor attempting to assign blame. It is what it is. Millions of Americans who work for or have worked for the US Government, myself included have been hacked. Not just hacked, but all of our secrets may soon be on public display or for sale or other.

In the past few years, US consumers have been the targets of hacks from any number of companies that were breached, from Target and Home Depot to Equifax and Anthem among the biggies. But the reality is most companies have probably been hacked.

Most small to medium business do not have the sophistication or the resources to put in place strong cyber defenses. Even for the ones that do, that does not mean a successful defense.

What it means for you:
1. We are all vulnerable. Do not think your information is safe.
2. Disconnect computers from the internet when not using them, and power them down. Same for devices like tablets or phones or other internet connected devices.
3. Create a backup hard drive, find an encryption program you can easily use, and create an encrypted back up of your life.
4. Maybe your whole world does not to be interconnected. Maybe the smart home is not so smart in light of the potential privacy and security vulnerabilities presented by the inter-connect.
5. Take steps to protect private information. Get a safe deposit box at a bank, put all original documents in it, plus a copy of them.
6. Try to make air gaps between your information. Keep your financial records in one secure place. Your medical records in another, different secure place.
7. Be aware that your life may well be not private at all.
8. You are not alone, in fact maybe your whole country is right in the same situation.

In 2013, at my Gov20LA event we hold annually, I made some remarks about the need for families around the world to adopt encryption techniques to protect their information and themselves. That message was partially intended for families trying to fight against tyranny abroad; but is also a critical message for all of us now.

Bottom line though is that the world has changed. *A lot.*

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Correlation of Wealth and Reputation Management

Wealth.

We all want it, work for it and strive for it throughout lives and careers.

Reputation.

We all have one. It us up to us to define it, scale it and defend it.

Which one is more valuable? Which one brings more of the other?

This is a two sided question. To some people, money is everything. To others, their reputation is everything, with money or without. While most people might reflexively think that money is more important, others will emphatically state that reputation management is paramount.

Some recent studies weigh in on the side of reputation. Reputation expert Michael Fertik recently weighed in on the issue in the UK’s Guardian Paper.

Digijaks CEO Alan W. Silberberg feels that money and reputation are completely intertwined; and that this effectively goes along with the associated correlation between social media and reputation management.

Money and Reputation are intertwined in ways most of us can barely recognize yet. Pretty soon, if not already, major banks are/will be assessing their clients not just based on assets under control, but on social indicators, and online reputation.

How many times have people searched you during or before routine financial meetings? Have you thought about this yet? 2015 definitely marks the year in which most of us need to start recognizing the distinct correlation between money and reputation — whether online or offline.

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Reputation Control and Management Proof of Search.

Reputation Control and Reputation Management

Digijaks has created proprietary technology and processes that enable us to excel at Reputation Control and Management, and sometimes a picture is worth more words.

This is such a case.

Digijaks 2015 SEO2Digijaks excels at Cyber Reputation Control and Management because we have developed a multi-tiered system that does not just focus on one element. Indeed we look at SEO, Search and Social Media as one group of data. People, events and traditional media are another. It is only when you look at both groups together in a holistic way, that your digital presence become holistic. Even when a typo is entered into search.

Note in the picture above, Digijaks is ahead of the biggest competitor in the space. TWICE.

Digijaks is privately owned and operated. We are competing in an industry that is not short on either venture capital or major players. Yet, our solution puts us on top, on top of all of that.

The marketplace is made up of well funded players and new and old companies. When you can own your space, own the digital real estate and the placement in search; against companies known only for doing that exact thing? That is exactly what Digijaks has done.

Being a start up CEO can be challenging; disruptive and demands the best of people to rise up to the occasion, every day. Looking at the above picture just gives me pride in what I have invented, and in the work that our team has done to get to this point. Thank you to everyone involved with Digijaks!

Now

Now ask yourself. Is it time to engage Digijaks for your company?

Well, the simple answer is Yes.

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