I'm Emily Campanio, and this is the Fox True Crime podcast.

The new Netflix documentary, Unknown Number, the high school catfish,

has exposed the ease with which people can anonymously target, harass, and threaten individuals online.

Unfortunately, with the rise of artificial intelligence and new technologies,

the means for people to create threats and so chaos like this have only become more sophisticated.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an important time to understand the ways in which

these seemingly common tools can be weaponized against us.

Heather Barnhart is a digital forensics expert and the head of faculty at Sands Institute.

She joins me now with more insight into these

types of cases and to discuss her own experience with digital harassment as well. Heather,

let's talk about unknown number. Now for anyone who hasn't seen the documentary, this is your

spoiler alert, guys, but we watch as this poor 13-year-old girl

is just relentlessly cyber-bullied for almost two years

and then only for her own mother

to be revealed as her tormentor.

Yeah, so I actually, I watched that.

And just going through it one,

how the response time and the response efforts of going through the school and all the things that occurred just kind of blew my mind

that law enforcement should have been involved the second anything relating to suicide or death

came in. It shouldn't have fallen on the school and the principal in the community

to try to figure this out. So that was the first thing. And if you notice when law enforcement

responded, they got access back to the potential locations within days when that one investigator

...