Good morning Reputation.com fans! Here are some of the things that the web is buzzing about this morning.

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Social Engineering Played Role in Google Attacks

An analysis of the Chinese attack on Google revealed that “social engineering” was involved in gaining access to Google’s data. Social engineering is a topic we’ve talked about briefly before, but essentially what it means is the manipulation social media technology to give the appearance that a person is receiving a message from their friend, when it is actually a hacker trolling for sensitive information. These kind of attacks are on the rise and are difficult to stop because they make personnel the weakpoint rather than any technical flaw.

Looking for a Job? Start Tweeting

The New York Times Bits Blog reports on a new Twitter tool called JobDeck, which is a desktop application combining TwitJobSearch and Tweetdeck, has just been developed. Twitter has become a very valuable tool for recruiting and tools like JobDeck will make it even easier for professionals to get their name out there. For more advice on using Twitter as a job-search tool, check out our Twitter Guide to Finding Your Next Job.

Flash-based Twitter Security Flaw Exposed, Then Closed

According to ReadWriteWeb, Foreground Security recently discovered a security flaw in Twitter’s Flash-based website widget thay could have allowed a hacker to access the login credentials of any Twitter user. The widget has been disabled while Twitter looks into the flaw, but early reports suggest it had existed for over a year.

Middle-School Student Suspended For Mocking Teacher on Facebook

A seventh-grade student in upstate New York was suspended from school for setting up a defamatory Facebook page about a teacher she didn’t like. Another 25 students who became fans of the group were given three days detention. Do you think the punishment is excessive? If I were the teacher, I wouldn’t think so.

Privacy vs. Vanity?

Daniel Sieberg of CBS News has an excellent editorial on Internet privacy and how voyeurism and vanity have in many ways replaced our instincts for keeping things private. From his article:

At some point in our digital evolution many of us traded privacy for ego. What I mean by that is that it became more intriguing, more tantalizing, to reveal our selves (or how we imagine ourselves) to the rest of the world rather than internalize our lives a bit more or share them with an immediate sphere of people (guilty as charged, as I’ve previously revealed).

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In the virtual worlds we can receive a broad spectrum of feedback and approval and encouragement in a brief period of time in a way that’s simply not possible in the real one. And it’s worth noting that privacy is not the same thing as secrecy. What we deem unfit for public consumption may still be something we share with our closest (real-life) friend. But our avatar or alter ego saw social networks as a chance to feel justified or accepted or vindicated. And if you think your social network profile doesn’t exemplify some of those tendencies then go through your list of friends and count how many you see on a regular basis or know really well or have ever met in person. Why do they each receive the same sentiments?

Google Is Watching You (At Least Your Google Toolbar Is)

According to a report in Mashable, security expert Ben Edelman has learned that the Google toolbar continues tracking your browsing history even when you have disabled that option. Edelman also notes that Google’s privacy disclosures have gotten weaker over time. For more details, check out Edelman’s full blog post.

Proactive online reputation management is something that all professionals should be considering, no matter what field in which they work. Just take a look back through the archives of the Reputation.com Blog. Over the past year, we have talked about the importance of reputation management for teachers, realtors, and even contractors. One area we haven’t talked about, however, is the legal field. So, is reputation management important for attorneys? You can bet your Juris Doctorate it is, and today we’re going to explain why.

Attorneys, perhaps more than any other professional besides doctors, rely on their reputations to find success in their career. This is especially true if you are an attorney working in private practice, where your name is literally tied to your professional identity. That being the case, imagine the kind of problems that a disgruntled client or cutthroat competitor could cause if they were to launch an all-out attack on your name. How much business would you stand to lose if the first Google result for your name was an anonymous blog post calling you a liar or a cheat? We’re guessing the answer is a lot.

To prevent this from happening, it is important to promote your positive reputation on the web and develop a strong buffer against cyber attacks. Check out these five tips to help you figure out how.

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1) Own Your Own Domain (Plus Variations)

It’s a good bet that you already have an online presence via your law firm’s website or, if you have a private practice, your own private homepage. If you do have a website already, you should work to leverage it for the maximum reputation management value by filling it with strong, search-engine optimized content about your professional history, education, and experience. You should also consider how your URL (the web address of your website) is constructed. For example, if you are Attorney Joe Johnson and you are operating the private practice Johnson Law Group, LLC, you may use the name of your practice as the URL, i.e. JohnsonLawGroup.com.

However, you should also look into setting up websites for other possible URL’s such as JoeJohnson.com, JoeJohnsonAttorney.com, and JoeJohnsonLawyer.com. If you don’t have time to build out these websites separately, you can simply redirect visitors to your primary homepage. In this way, you can help ensure that your name will be protected in multiple incarnations and be available for multiple search queries.

2) Share Your Expertise

On your way to becoming a licensed attorney, you probably spent a lot of sleepless nights poring over your thousand-page textbooks. Don’t let that effort, nor the money you spent on law school, go to waste when you’re not actively working with a client. Setting up a personal blog, or contributing to other blogs focused on your legal specialty, is a good way of not only demonstrating your expertise, but taking up another position in your Google search results. Additionally, if you can secure a regular position as a commentator at a widely-read blog, or if you can turn your own blog into a go-to resource for legal scholars, you are vastly increasing your odds of bringing in new clients.

The important thing to remember about blogging as an attorney, however, is to be careful about offering specific legal advice. If possible, focus on broader legal analysis related to your expertise. To offer more direct advice, provide a link to your primary homepage, or give your contact information in your byline.

3) Own Your Profile On Lawyer Review Sites

Google ranks consumer review sites very highly, a fact of life that small business owners of all kinds have had to learn. For attorneys with positive reviews, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and could even mean an increase in clients. However, one bad review, especially if it is the only review, can cause significant problems for your online reputation.

As the web has become more and more niche-driven, a number of profession-specific review sites have popped up. For attorneys, some of the most well-known review sites include Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, and LawyerRatingz.com. Avvo and Martindale both allow attorneys to claim their profiles and add content to help demonstrate their expertise and experience. On Avvo, attorneys can also use the website to answer questions and give general legal advice, which can also help positively promote their reputation online. While it is possible for unscrupulous reviewers to game the system and skew ratings, by joining a review website, you can more effectively manage the blowback from a negative review.

4) Put Those Research Skills to Good Use

In law school you learned how to research. As a licensed attorney, you can use this valuable skill to research your own name on Google and other search engines to keep track of how you’re appearing in search results. Staying on top of news about you online is one of the most important things you can do to help prevent negative stories from spreading too quickly. A simple way of monitoring your name on the web is to set up a Google news alert for your name or the name of your practice.

Of course, there’s more to searching the web than a simple vanity search. At Reputation.com, we developed MyReputation to scour the web for any and all information about our customers online. If you want to really know what people are saying about you online, MyReputation is the best way of finding out.

5) Don’t Forget to Use Discretion

Assuming that you take our advice and begin proactively using web tools to defend and manage your reputation online, you should always remember that what you put online will be there forever (or at least you should think of it that way). If you are blogging, use discretion about the information you are sharing. Obviously, this means no talking about your clients and doing the best to keep too much of your personal brand from slipping into your professional identity.

You know, the web is a truly wonderful and wacky place. Without fail, every new day offers a significant development in the world of social media. What’s more, whether it’s Facebook’s latest privacy change, Twitter’s ongoing growth, or the web’s newest celebrity death rumor, all of these stories are significant to the fields of online reputation management and Internet privacy.

That’s why we’re going to try something new on the Reputation.com Blog. Beginning today, our first post of the morning will highlight all of the news stories related to reputation management, Internet privacy, and social media that we think you should check out. Throughout the day, we may return to some of these stories for additional analysis, but this is our way of making sure that you get the latest news and information that can help you protect your good name online.

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Cyberbullying Victims Fighting Back?

According to an article in the New York Post, in light of the Liskula Cohen v. Google ruling (which we have covered extensively here at the Reputation.com Blog), more and more victims of anonymous online attacks are consulting with attorneys to learn what their legal recourse is against online defamation.

Your Brain Can’t Handle All of Your Facebook Friends!

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has a theory that the cognitive limit on the number of friends a person can have and actually keep track of is 150. Now, according to Mashable, Dunbar has shown that this number is accurate for Facebook friends as well. Does that seem like a realistic assessment? How many Facebook friends do you have?

Chinese Government Denies Involvement on Google Attack

Mashable reports that the Chinese government has finally gone on the record denying any involvement in recent cyberattacks against Google, which were partly responsible for prompting the company to consider leaving the Chinese market.

The Future of Twitter: Location, Location, Location

If you use Twitter, you may or may not have noticed that the trending topics section on your profile can now be set to location-specific trends (this functionality has not been unrolled for everyone). This development is part of an effort by Twitter (and numerous other web companies) to harness the power of hyper-local search. Mashable has a great analysis of Twitter’s ongoing development of location-based technology.

Exploring the Journalistic Value of Social Media

A couple of weeks ago, a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism discovered that 95% of original news stories come from “old media” such as newspapers and are then disseminated and analyzed through “new media” tools. This begged the question of what value there is in utilizing social media as a news source. Five international journalists may soon be able to answer this question by participating in an experiment where they have no access to reporting tools besides social media. The goal is to see how accurately they can assess breaking news when only using something like Twitter or Facebook rather than reading the entire news article.

Look Out World, My Daughter’s on Facebook

Detroit Free Press columnist Jeff Seidel shares a pretty amusing column about his decision to let his daughter use Facebook. The column itself is meant to be taken as a joke, but I think it touches on some of the actual feelings parents have about making the decision to allow their children to participate in social media.

Convicted Murderer Has Facebook Profile Revoked

A UK man convicted of murder was using a Facebook page from within prison to promote his innocence. The family of the murder victim appealed to Facebook to shut down the page because they believed it was a form of harassment against them. Facebook has complied and removed the account, though it’s unclear if they did so at the family’s request or because the prisoner was not supposed to have access to Facebook from prison.

Johnny Depp Joins List of Celebrity Death Hoaxes on Twitter

Because of the speed with which information spreads online, it’s no surprise there have been so many Twitter-fueled hoaxes in recent months. This phenomena is felt nowhere more clearly than in the celebrity death hoax. In the past, Jeff Goldblum, Taylor Lautner, and Zach Braff have been swept up in Twitter death hoaxes. This time, the Twitter world has deemed that Johnny Depp died in an auto accident. Naturally, of course, Mr. Depp is fine.

Imperva, the first company to announce last month’s hack of social networking applications developer RockYou, has completed an analysis of the more than 32 million passwords that were exposed. In their findings, Imperva discovered that the top five passwords used were 123456, 12345, 123456789, password, and iloveyou. Yikes. Looks like some people need to review Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik’s tips for picking a strong password.

In an article for Computer World, Jaikumar Vijayan further explores Imperva’s findings.

According to Imperva, about 30% of the passwords in the hacked list were six characters or smaller, while 60% were passwords created from a limited set of alphanumeric characters. Nearly 50% of the users had used easily guessable names, common slang words, adjacent keyboard keys and consecutive digits as their passwords.

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Many of the top 5,000 passwords in the list were identical to those found in password dictionaries, which are used by hackers to brute-force their way into accounts, said Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva. On average, a malicious attacker using such a password dictionary would have been able to break into a RockYou account at the rate of roughly one every second using an automated password-guessing tool, he said.

While RockYou is to blame for keeping their users password information woefully underprotected, Imperva’s data would suggest that the users themselves don’t seem to care much about privacy. Implementing strong passwords on all of your Internet accounts is a major component of protecting your identity on the web. As a society, we live too much of our lives online to be irresponsible about our data privacy. If you have weak passwords, change them now, before it’s too late.

We all know how easy it is to find information about someone online. A quick Google search and a scan of the major social networks is usually enough to give you all the background information you need. But what if you’re a stalker on the go? Don’t worry, a new iPhone application has got you covered.

According to PCWorld, the iPhone app comes from BeenVerified, a company that offers background check services. In a press release describing the application, BeenVerified CEO Josh Levy said,

“A BeenVerified background check contains information collected from thousands of public records and publicly available data where the average person would not even know where to begin. All of the information found in our reports is already out there and accessible to anyone.”

The fact that the information is out there and accessible to anyone anyway should do little to comfort indviduals concerned for their privacy, especially since the whole purpose of companies like BeenVerified is to present this information as easily and accurately as possible. In the past, it could have taken weeks for an individual to track down someone’s private information through public records, but with applications like this it only takes a matter of seconds.

Do you know where your information is on the web?

Do you know how to remove it?

At Reputation.com, we’ve worked long and hard on the development of MyPrivacy to help individuals with this very goal. With MyPrivacy, Reputation.com can help you remove your personal information from hundreds of people search databases all over the Internet, keeping your identity secure and giving you additional protection against fraud and invasive marketing. To learn more about MyPrivacy, please contact one of our trained reputation management experts today.