The side comments, emails and creepy looks never stopped. Eventually, he was fired, and that's when the trouble really started.
Armed with full knowledge of the company's network, he had little trouble breaking into its computer system from the outside. He assumed several identities and started firing off embarrassing emails about her around the firm. He took secret documents and, posing as other company employees, made veiled threats to release the secrets to the public. Meanwhile, he continued to try to get a rise out of the clerk. At one point, he "gave" her a US$130,000-a-year raise.
Fortunately, he did most of his dirty work sitting behind a computer at his new employer--and with one email, he made a mistake.
"He sent it from his work account rather than an assumed account," said Eric Friedberg, a former prosecutor for the US attorney's office in New York. Friedberg now operates a private computer crimes consulting business called Stroz Associates. Armed with that single email, Friedberg went to the suspect's new employer and got the firm's cooperation. Computer logs there provided plenty of evidence, and the suspect has now been indicted.
The Internet's annals are full of horrible, it-could-never-happen-to-me stalking cases.
There's the California woman whose home address was published in Usenet groups by an ex-boyfriend, along with a message indicating she fantasised about being raped. Six volunteers arrived within days. And there's Amy Boyer, murdered by a stalker who tracked her using an online database.
But cyberstalking doesn't have to come in such fanatical flavours, and it doesn't happen only in the far corners of the Internet, on bulletin boards or in chat rooms.
Stalking is going mainstream, some say. The gender gap is slipping; by some measures, women are the harassers in nearly one-third of cyberstalking cases. And stalking has made its way into the workplace, where jilted lovers follow the object of their obsessions virtually as they head to the office. Thanks to stalking's terrorising cousin identity theft, interoffice stalking incidents may even be increasing, said Parry Aftab, who runs Cyberangels.org, an online stalking victims resource.
"It's moving back into the workplace in a very serious way now," Aftab said. Of the 600 or so cases of stalking reported each day to Cyberangels, she says about one-fourth involve office problems.
