This idiocy called Swatting

[Bonesy]

Enough of the generalised pejoratives already. Tens of millions of gamers should not be branded because of the actions of a few hundred unhinged individuals. It probably happens that gamers are more often behind swatting because unhinged gamers tend to be more tech-savvie than your average unhinged youtube comments troll.

Calling in bomb threats has been around for ages, and it has been used for petty reasons. Swatting is just a somewhat more creative way of realising the same motivations.

I think things like this are a natural and inevitable outcome of the loss of privacy on the internet that allows sociopaths and people with other emotional deformities to know where you live. If I can have a single online interaction with you, believing it to be anonymous but you can use the small amount of information that is unique to me that comes with that so-called anonymous interaction to find out where I live, who I am and what I do then that exposes me to all sorts of vindictive and cruel behaviours as revenge for perceived wrongs.

So don't be an asshole? The worst thing that's happened to me via the internet is that some people won't talk to me for a few years.

[Fragile Bird]

I don't know if this was swatting or not, but apparently a series of bomb threats was called in to various airlines last week, and just now bomb threats were apparently called into the White House, to the Press Briefing Room. Earlier today threats were made to Capitol Hill.

CNBC is showing live shots of the press briefing room being evacuated, the secret service coming in with search dogs.

There is a very high level of security clearance you have to go through in order to obtain what they call a "hard pass", to be able to get into the briefing room. The clearances could take a year or longer. The reporters are vetted and have to go through security to get to the briefing room. The reports say that while people in Washington are used to the occasional threat occurring, but they have never seen this level of secure space being threatened in this manner.

Nothing came from the bomb threats to the airlines last week. But many people have been inconvenienced and even frightened and likely millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on searches, extra checks, evacuations and ongoing investigations.

And it's not possible to tell if this was done by "swatters" or by serious security risks.

[Fragile Bird]

Do you remember when Xbox Live and Playstation were crashing two years ago because a hacker disrupted things?

A Finnish teenager has been found guilty of a massive hacking spree that went after emails, websites and credit card data around the world, including at Harvard and MIT.

Julius Kivimaki, 17, was convicted of involvement in 50,700 cyber attacks by a court in Espoo, Finland, near Helsinki, earlier this week, according to Finnish and other media.

​He was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence, meaning that he will not spend any time in jail. The court deemed his offences to have been committed as a juvenile, reports said.

Kivimaki was also ordered to pay back $9,225 in criminal proceeds and to hand over his computer.

The cyber attacks all happened between late 2012 and September 2013, and involved everything from phishing (email hacking) to shutting down websites and so-called swatting, where fake emergency calls are placed to law enforcement so that SWAT teams get deployed.

The targets included U.S. universities MIT and Harvard, gaming platforms Xbox Live and Playstation Network, and individuals.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/julius-kivimaki-finnish-teen-convicted-for-50-700-cyber-attacks-1.3144961

Nothing like a 15 year old to find swatting a fun thing to do.