A family devastated by relentless cyberattacks | Hacker News Reader

A family devastated by relentless cyberattacks

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91 pointsrafaelm36 comments

Comments like "Not exactly somebody I feel much sympathy for" and "he definitely was heavily involved in similar activity himself" miss the point entirely. The point is that swatting is too easy. Victims can't count on law enforcement to help. Family members are victims too, and they're powerless. I don't care how little sympathy you feel for Blair/r000t, his little sister did not deserve to have her school put on lockdown because of something her brother may or may not have done online.

I wonder if anyone setup a fund for her? She is probably going to need some help given the constant attacks.

the service providers: the florist, the pizza restaurant, the community depending on civic services are all victims in this spat also. i can't imagine family owned flower and restaurant businesses enjoying losing thousands and thousands of dollars to phoney orders, let alone tying up the police and firefighters on prank calls.

I think it's worse that the mom was fired from her job because of the attacks and had a miscarriage, and now she can't find a new job because of the damage to her reputation.

Well that was an unpleasant read and it sounds like an absolute horror story for this group of people.

I, for one, am at a loss as to a solution for antics like this. It ends up affecting the entire community when police and fire personnel are being called to locations where no crime or fire is occuring, schools are being put on lockdown, and small businesses and franchises are making orders for people who did not desire to purchase their products. And the idea of having your utilities shutting off is pretty harrowing.

What do you do at this point? I'm surprised they haven't lifted roots, changed names, and moved but that's a tall order.

If they used very generic names like John Smith they'd likely be able to escape into obscurity regarding searches. They could proceed to stay off social media.

But is that a solution? Or forcing innocent people to abandon their lives they spent so long building up for the spat of two teenage/now young twentyish age kids?

We're starting to see two factor authentication become a thing more and more often, and password managers. These seem like they could help a lot of people tremendously but when companies value security over convenience people are probably far less likely to use their services en masse.

And of course where would the advertising revenue come from if client information was too strongly protected.

How intractable is this issue? And will there be a day when an 18 year old from halfway around the globe won't be able to destroy a family over a period of years? And if that day comes, what does it entail for individual liberties and privacy?

The NY Times also just ran a story[1] on another serial swatter, including the immense effort (over 1000 hours across all involved) of a rankled Georgia detective to actually bring him to justice, since the swatter was a Canadian minor.

Little help from the FBI until the victim count had surpassed 40. Extreme difficulty getting Canadian law enforcement to play ball until they were able to get video evidence of the swatter broadcasting his antics live on the internet.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatte...

And all this for a guy whose full name and address is contained within a Pastebin entry on the first page of search results when you Google his username! Imagine how hard it must be to identify swatters who have serious OPSEC.

I think the reality is when he was caught, that Pastebin page didn't have anywhere near the PageRank it does today. Moreover, the detective that did the bulk of the legwork wasn't tremendously savvy in regards to how online communities (and all the activity) work, which makes it a bit impressive that he was able to get his perp. He had a real ramp up there in order to be able to make real progress.

>I think the reality is when he was caught, that Pastebin page didn't have anywhere near the PageRank it does today.

That may be so, but you would think one of the first things an investigator of cybercrimes would do is Google search. Searches of "[username] real name" or "[username] dox" could provide instant leads for tons of cases.

>the detective that did the bulk of the legwork wasn't tremendously savvy in regards to how online communities (and all the activity) work

Indeed, this is the real issue. It's unfortunate that cybercrime investigators did not even bother looking into this. I suppose they may have their hands caught up with admittedly worse crimes, like child pornography and theft.

Good lord, only 16 months for all the chaos that little dipshit caused? Get it together Canada.. There is no chance he suddenly becomes a useful person. I'd have no qualms at all for putting him in jail for 10 years.

It sounds like the only serious, tangible problem that happened was that Amy's employer (Ingalls) fired her because she was the victim of hackers, and then she couldn't get a new job because future employers didn't like what hackers had written about her on the internet. This is a pretty big failure of employment law as well as immoral behavior of the employers. That's the kind of widespread discrimination that we try to prevent against blacks, women, etc. But it can still be perpetrated against individuals and there isn't even any popular belief that it's wrong.

Imagine two headlines:

"Ingalls Health System fires woman after finding offensive comments on her social media account."

"Ingalls Health System fires woman after finding that she was gay."

Both are equally terrible, but only one is popularly considered to be very bad.

I pretty sure the daughter and local busk pail dispute your assessment of only one serious tangible problem.

local busk pail? I'm not denying there were a lot of horrible things, but largely temporary and more psychological than financial. Even the son being held in jail for 2 weeks doesn't seem as bad in the long term as losing your income, your ability to get a job, and consequently your house.

Businesses - man I really hate autocorrect

I doubt the affect on the daughter or the husband are temporary, they will get hit as everything lives on in search.

Wow, that's pretty messed up. But do you know what's the worst thing here?

How someone got fired simply because people were talking crap about them/in a feud with a member of their family. How exactly is that legal? Why are we seeing employees firing people just because people insult them online? That Ingalls would do this is utterly pathetic.

Oh, and the whole utility companies thing. Why? Do they not train their staff about this sort of thing nowadays? Is it really so hard to ask for the password first, and then simply cut off the call if it isn't provided? It's like they trust people far too much nowadays.

If those things were resolved, events like this would be far less damaging in the future.

That's what "at will" employment is, sadly.

This doesn't sound like what I would think of as "cyber attacks". This is a traditional leverage of a militarized police force as a weapon. The same could easily have happened before the internet, and I suspect it was less common and less intense because before there were SWAT teams it wasn't possible.

This couldn't have happened before the internet: many of the attacks are automated and many take advantage of the fact that you don't have to pay extortionate long-distance rates for international phone calls, both direct consequences of the ease of communication enabled by the internet of today.

Calling in pizza, gravel delivery, police, and hourly death threats from Finland in 1991 would have been quite expensive.

Additionally, it was really hard to piss people off who lived far away from you before the internet took off. Even if a Finn could do all these things in 1991 (phone phreaking to bypass the high cost?) they would have no motivation since they'd probably never get that pissed off at somebody in the US.

And what they want is a reaction. Without the internet they would not be able to see any reaction.

It certainly wouldn't have been called swatting. Prior to the 1990's, only large metro departments like the LAPD had SWAT teams.

The Internet really is necessary for this sort of sustained attack to be successful. It requires a large number of distributed, anonymous actors. This wouldn't be possible without message boards and the like. Had this been one bad actor with a vendetta in the pre-Internet era, they would have been found and stopped.

Of course they are also leveraging some fairly modern services: TTY relay services for the hearing impaired, Tor (to include onion services), as well as commercial cybercrime services available via private and darkweb markets. Without these resources, it is much easier to identify people.

"She asks the policemen precisely what she needs to do to prove she hasn’t just been murdered. Holding out her arm, she sighs as they take her blood pressure."

What? Seriously? I mean, yes cops are incredibly stupid, but they're not this stupid. I don't believe this happened. And if it did, the cop should be fired. Can someone really be that stupid to think that someone who is standing up in front of them is not alive? I call bullshit. Even a cop cannot be that stupid.

EDIT: Why not just ask for ID, since now all the cop's proven is that someone is alive, not who that person is. Ridiculous.

Maybe they were checking if she was on drugs or something.

When you call 911 the police usually show up followed by paramedics / fire dept or vice versa. Depending on the city this is standard practice. The medics typically take blood pressure before leaving, not sure why but assuming this is a policy about confirming everyone is ok before they leave.

The writer likely simplified the scene by omitting the fact that EMTs arrived with the police.

I can't help but notice Blair (the fellow who, in theory, drew the troll's ire) is basically never looking at the camera, and is wearing a Postal t-shirt. Not exactly somebody I feel much sympathy for.

The real point, though, is only brought up towards the end of the article: it's the hyperactive and hyperconvenient systems in place that allow for such easy exploitation and harassment. Swatting wouldn't happen if police were a bit more measured in their responses.

and is wearing a Postal t-shirt

What's wrong with Postal? It's a good franchise, although RWS' decision to outsource Postal III development to Akella proved to be a gaffe. Nonetheless, it is hardly any more obscene than, say, South Park.

Well, if you're doing a character piece, and the person who is arguably at least half to blame for the misfortune befalling his family is cheerfully wearing a shirt for a game explicitly about causing collateral damage to civilians...it's rather tacky.

Swatting wouldn't happen if police were a bit more measured in their responses.

Absolutely. It's shameful that HN has become so bootlicking in its love for authority that you've been downvoted this severely.

I don't think the comment was downvoted for that, I think it was the "hard to feel any sympathy" line...

The will be devastated by obesity anytime soon...

Not that Blair/r000t deserves this sort of retaliation, but he definitely was heavily involved in similar activity himself in the past, and has poked the hornet's nest many a time.

Warning: graphic/obscene content.

https://encyclopediadramatica.se/R000t

https://r000t.com/

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