Robert Siciliano discusses the 2008 disappearance of 12-year-old Brooke Bennett in Vermont. The segment covers the search at Sunset Lake, a suspected MySpace account linked to her case, and investigative steps like subpoenaing chat logs and tracing IP addresses. Siciliano advises parents on monitoring software and online safety.
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We're going to walk over if we can to the national desk because there's some breaking information coming in about this story with Brooke Bennett. She's the 12-year-old from Vermont who went missing yesterday, is still missing today. There's a search going on at a lake in Vermont, and now we've got new information. Tim, what do you know?
Yeah, we're still keeping an eye and staying on the phones about the search in Sunset Lake. They can't really tell us anything new about that. Uh, what we've been doing now is working on this MySpace page. Police not releasing a lot of information. We actually think with the help of our New York bureau upstairs that we have identified the right MySpace page, and we're looking at the contacts there, her quote-unquote friends. We're even trying to contact Brooke herself. Who knows, maybe at some point she'll get back onto her MySpace page. You know, there's a lot of reports being that they're looking outside the state, but right now we're focusing our producers on this MySpace page, and we're hoping to get some information from that that we can give the viewers and also help the police at the same time.
Tim Gunn, thanks very much. And if you don't know the backstory on this MySpace page for Brooke Bennett, apparently her father set her up with a page a while back, and then he didn't like what he was seeing. He didn't like that the content that was on the page, so he, he took it away from her. And then she said that she was 14 years old and started her own MySpace page and apparently met whomever she was with now on her MySpace page, which is owned by the parent company of this network. Let's head up now to Martha and the panel.
All right, Trace, thank you very much. Keeping on this story, I want to bring in an internet security analyst, Robert Siciliano, and he does a lot of work in forensics over the course of the internet and figuring out where people were and how to do that with kidnets. Safe.com, and he joins me now. Robert, this story is really every parent's nightmare, I can honestly say, as the mother of a 12-year-old daughter is the same age as this girl. You're supposed to be 14 to get on this site, right?
Yeah, but the anonymity of the web makes it possible for just about anybody, including even a sex offender, to sign up and get a MySpace or a Facebook or any type of social networking page.
Is there any way for parents to know for sure whether or not their kid's on this, even if they're telling them that they're not?
You know, the days of telling your kids not to talk to strangers is completely over. That was never a good way to educate them on personal security. And what you should be doing right now is installing monitoring software on that child's computer and monitor every single thing they do. Every keystroke typed, every username and password, every website visited, every chat log. You monitor what they do online via software that you install so you know exactly what they're doing, where they are, and who they're talking to.
And that kind of software is available at any place that you would buy software?
If you go online and you search monitoring software, there's tons of— there's many, many companies that offer it, and I absolutely, positively recommend every single parent install it yesterday.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. Now let's talk about this case for a minute, Robert. What can they do to figure out exactly where she was, who she was interacting with, and where these people live, if possible? How to find them?
Well, if they have access to her MySpace account, which apparently they do— Fox does, law enforcement should— they can subpoena MySpace, and MySpace can get right into the chat logs. Forensic specialist, they're able to take that computer and they can, via the autocomplete feature, find out the username and password, find out who she's been chatting with. It all goes back to the IP address, the Internet Protocol address of who she's chatting with. And both via her internet service provider and MySpace themselves, they should be able to piece something together and find out who she's been talking to.
All right. And as we understand from this case— thank you very much for joining us today with that very, very important information. We really appreciate it. And this is sort of more background. Background on this story. Brooke's father, James Bennett, says that he helped Brooke create a MySpace page, and then he pulled the plug on it months ago when he found what he called inappropriate activity on there. Uh, seems like a very responsible action to take for him. Uh, the 12-year-old then set up a new account, though, without her parents knowing. And let me assure you folks, this happens all the time.
