news-record.com

GREENSBORO - It's a fair bet that the social networking pages of N.C. A&T computer science majors look different today than they did yesterday.

Maurice Williams, a junior with a double major in computer science and computer engineering, said he never thought about how many ways there are to be vulnerable online until he saw a presentation on keeping personal information safe held at the campus Tuesday afternoon.

After the presentation, Williams said he was going to make changes to his social networking pages to avoid the mistakes he learned of in the presentation.

"I'll definitely go back and make sure it's safe," Williams said.

Linda Criddle, an Internet security consultant, told the auditorium of students what criminals would see in their profiles: names, addresses, friends, party details.

"You have assumptions of safety that are not correct," Criddle said.

Students laughed as Criddle played the role of a criminal casing their MySpace or Facebook page for information to use to target them. She told the students what a criminal sees in their online persona: pet names that are often used as passwords; photos of their house, their parents or children. The name of their school or church.

It usually takes her nine minutes to collect enough information a criminal needs to target anyone for a crime, she said. And the occasional automatic "out-of-office" e-mail response that tells criminals how long they have to rob a house.

Criddle worked for Microsoft for 13 years, working on safety features for the company's consumer applications. After leaving, Criddle wrote a book about online safety and continues to consult and educate about Internet safety with her own company, Look Both Ways Online Safety Consulting.

She encouraged the students to check their credit reports three times a year - more often if they had already been victims of identity theft - then warned them that they might already have had their identity stolen.

"The difference between having your identity stolen and abused is time," Criddle said. "They can't process all of the opportunity they have."

Criddle's goal in speaking to the students was to make them aware of the threat they were exposed to, but also to pique their interest in the field of Internet security.

"There's a significant shortage in people who know how to stop them (online predators)," Criddle said. "The Internet is a valuable tool and we have the right to use it safely."

Contact Sonja Elmquist at 373-7090 or sonja.elmquist@news-record.com