| | Issue #20.02 :: 08/06/2008 - 08/12/2008 | Swatted
When a fake 911 call dispatches armed police to knock down your door, watch out: It may be the work of Anonymous
| BY JOSHUA MCCRACKEN
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AUGUSTA, GA - “I’m sorry, I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it,” A frightened voice stammered at the other end of the phone line. A 911 operator in Allen, Texas, listened intently.
“What? What did you do, sir?
” The operator’s voice had edge now as she became increasingly concerned.
“I didn’t mean to!” The man continued to ramble. After some prodding, he eventually revealed that he had murdered his mother after she found his stash of kiddie porn. He began hyperventilating before announcing he was about to go on a shooting rampage in his neighborhood and abruptly ending the call. His last words spoke of randomly killing innocents so as to “go out with a bang.”
A few minutes later, calls from witnesses began pouring in. The 911 operators heard screams and gunshots in the background. As a result, heavily armed police units were dispatched.
At his home in Allen, Joey Porter sat quietly with a small group of friends playing an online video game called Half Life II. Porter was seated at his computer with headphones blaring when there was a knock at the door. His friends glanced out of the front window and saw four or five vehicles parked nearby.
When they answered the door, a heavily armed team of police officers stormed in with weapons drawn. Porter, seated in his room and oblivious to the goings-on, turned around for a moment while playing his game — just in time to notice two police officers leveling a shotgun and pistol at him.
He had been “swatted,” as the computer hackers call it. A false 911 call had been concocted with the sole purpose of sending a SWAT team into the home of an unsuspecting victim.
It has happened in Augusta. On June 12, NBC Augusta and News Channel 6 ran stories on a swatting that took place at a residence on Baywood Drive.
The accused perpetrator, the victim’s ex-girlfriend, did not use any kind of caller-ID spoofing that is typically used in a swatting, but instead made a simple phone call to the Richmond Country Sheriff’s office claiming that a “domestic murder” had taken place. When deputies arrived on the scene, no one answered the door and the SWAT team was called. Upon entering the home and searching it, police learned that the incident was a prank.
Jessica Austin was taken into custody and charged with falsely reporting a crime. However, if she had been a member of the group called Anonymous, or had been skillful enough to use that group’s techniques, she probably would have gotten away with the crime — as have people responsible for swattings in Texas and elsewhere in the nation.
As Joseph Porter knows, a swatting is as much an assault on someone’s home and life as a burglary or robbery. He remembers looking in the eyes of the officers holding guns on him.
“We have a call of shots fired,” one officer barked. “You! Stay here.”
Police not only combed his residence, they were so convinced a psychopath was on the rampage that they went up and down his street, knocking on front doors and questioning his neighbors one by one. The psychopath never existed.
It was the creation of the group of hackers that call themselves Anonymous. They preserve the 911 calls as digital recordings to laugh at later. Not only have we heard the story from Porter, Metro Spirit has also heard recordings of one other crime presented to us from a member of that gang.
According to the FBI, between 2002 and 2006, Guadalupe Santana Martinez, 32, and several other individuals were responsible for swatting more than 250 victims in numerous cities nationwide, resulting in over $250,000 in damages. Martinez and his associates were eventually apprehended by law enforcement and have pled guilty to numerous federal and state charges, including conspiring with others to commit access device fraud and unauthorized access to protected computers. Martinez was sentenced to 30 months in prison in April of this year.
Stuart Rosoff, of Ohio — a co-defendant from the Martinez case — and four co-conspirators were indicted in a separate case by a federal grand jury in Dallas, Texas, in June of 2007 for their roles in allegedly swatting more than 100 victims in over 60 cities nationwide.
According to a press release issued by the Department of Justice on March 12 of this year, Rosoff had almost two dozen accomplices — many of whom have not yet been apprehended to our knowledge.
This new phenomenon is sweeping the nation, becoming a fast-growing trend in the digital underground. Swatting seems to have become a personal favorite for members of Anonymous, the largest gang of computer hackers to date. The group claims tens of thousands of members across the world.
The group is known to silence its most outspoken opponents with relentless online harassment. These days, Anonymous has also begun targeting some of those victims with real life death threats, swattings, vandalism, harassing phone calls and a series of other attacks that have caused some to fear for their lives.
Members of Anonymous were even reportedly responsible for threats to bomb sports stadiums across the country, threats that garnered national media attention but are now considered to have been a hoax.
News reports verify claims that Anonymous members have hacked more than 80,000 MySpace passwords and distributed them among themselves for random acts of vandalism. The attack on MySpace is unprecedented — the largest attack we have ever seen against a social networking site.
Sources inside Anonymous, speaking on conditions of anonymity, tell us that members have harvested passwords for various e-mail accounts and YouTube using “phishing” attacks. That’s where hackers set up Web pages designed as exact duplicates of other Web sites, but which are now used to trick victims into divulging their passwords.
Members of Anonymous are known to control botnets, which are often vast networks of computers compromised by malware. Malicious individuals can use these networks to log every key pressed, retrieve passwords and all personal data stored on hard drives, or launch attacks against external Web sites rendering them unusable.
Thousands of members of the gang have been involved in protests against the Church of Scientology at various Scientology locations across the globe, including cities in England, Canada, Australia and here in the U.S. While the protestors often wore masks over their faces and appeared to be demonstrating legally, the gang has launched an ongoing campaign to disrupt the church’s communications with a series of denial-of-service attacks, among many other things.
A denial of service attack, or DDoS, typically involves using a botnet that consists of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of compromised computers that connect to a centralized chat server to accept commands from the hacker that controls the network.
During a DDoS attack, these computers begin sending large quantities of junk data to a target specified by the hacker.
The large volumes of data being sent from thousands of compromised computers around the world, simultaneously, consumes the bandwidth of the target, meaning that the target system can no longer communicate with the outside world. If someone was to DDoS systems critical to the operation of banks, for example, it could prevent anyone from accessing the bank’s Web site and withdrawing and/or depositing funds.
It should be noted that such an attack on a bank would be very complicated to carry out. It would require more computers than most botnets have, so it is unlikely that this scenario would occur. Anonymous’ attacks on Scientology, however, were successful and they disrupted communications for the church.
Anonymous is also known for online attacks of groups of people who call themselves “furries.” Furries are people who dress up like animals, often for erotic purposes. It’s something members of Anonymous enjoy poking fan at.
Our source, who we’ll call “Jack,” told us that Anonymous attacks people considered to be “lulzcows,” a term for anyone who gives “hilarious” reactions when being harassed.
“Anonymous grew out of the /b/ board on 4chan,” Jack told us. “Problems on 4chan, which included a lack of banning furries, caused a sort of civil war which ended with a mass emigration to a new chan. This cycle repeated for other chans.”
A chan is simply a site at a Web address ending with chan that contains imageboards used by members to communicate with each other. For instance, 711chan and 915chan are both examples.
Jack, an extremely active member of Anonymous, explained that members of the organization like to “troll” people. “A troll is a lot like how it’s described in Wikipedia. It’s someone who searches for suckers on the Internet to exploit for laughs,” he said.
“Exploiting victims for other things, like money, doesn’t count as trolling.”
The activities of Anonymous vary depending on the subgroup. One is called /i/, which stands for “invasion board.”
“The deepest layers of /i/ are the ones doing the hardcore stuff you’re talking about,” Jack explained when we mentioned some of the organization’s more sinister activities. Another subgroup, known as /b/, is supportive, but not necessarily doing anything illegal.
“The Anonymous culture, if you can even call it that, evolved from people on this board anonymously posting the most random and grotesque things possible. Their anonymity also brought out the most malicious side of people, which inherently lead to the trolling,” Jack said.
Many members of the organization seem to be particularly fearful of falling out of favor with the collective. The group has its own ethical ground rules. When members post and coordinate “invasions,” they are often careful not to suggest “raids” that they gain from personally. Using Anonymous as a “personal army” has resulted in severe reprisals from the rest of the group on several occasions, according to Jack.
Jack told us that members of the group are at odds at times, particularly when it comes to the attacks on Scientology. Anonymous’ activities have included denial of service attacks against Church of Scientology Web servers, the posting and spread of sensitive Scientology documents across the Internet, harassing phone calls targeting Scientology phone systems, sending looped blackened faxes to quickly use up ink in Scientology fax machines, and more. Some of the attacks have been based on moral differences with the church, and some are based just on fun.
“People who are protesting and attacking Scientology in order to accomplish any purpose except trolling are in direct conflict with the rest of us. These people are not true anons. They are a cancer that we shall extinguish. Anonymous has raided Scientology, but only for the sake of laughs — which we refer to as lulz,” Jack said. “As I have said, we oppose raids based on morals.”
The size of the organization is hard to determine, but its work is popular. Jack said, “Every YouTube video relevant to Anonymous gets maybe 300,000-400,000 hits.”
He suggests that would be the best means of measurement to go by, though not all viewers are members.
However, with the exception of swatting, most Anonymous attacks are non-violent. The “exploding vans” once referred to by a Fox News story are not, to the best of our knowledge, actually part of Anonymous’ arsenal.
Sources allege that Anonymous’ latest raid targets none other than Wal-Mart.
The raid involves uploading images of stereotypical African-American males to the Wal-Mart Web site and having them printed out en-masse via Wal-Mart photo centers, where they will remain until someone renders payment and picks them up — which won’t happen. This type of resource disruption is the organization’s MO and appears to be a preferred means for achieving “lulz.”
If the majority of Anonymous’ membership were to participate in this raid, it is likely that tens of millions of copies of photos would be printed and wasted in Wal-Mart stores all across the globe, disrupting the work of employees and costing Wal-Mart significant amounts of money in wasted resources.
Anonymous is typically coordinated from one of several not-so-secret Web sites. 4chan, 420chan, 7chan, 711chan and 915chan are all “channer” Web sites that are typically visited solely by members of Anonymous and the FBI who may be investigating them — though law enforcement has been strangely silent in regards to Anonymous.
Swatting is extremely dangerous for the victims. While it is clear that some individuals, such as Jack, think of swatting as a type of prank, it is widely believed that many people who are doing this are doing so with malicious intent. They are putting real people in very real danger.
Richmond County Sheriff Ron Strength said he is very much aware of the situation.
“We have not experienced cases of swattings using caller-ID spoofing locally, but we fully expect that at some point we will,” Strength said.
He said the National Sheriff’s Association has distributed warnings across the country advising law enforcement agencies that certain services are being sold on the Internet that malicious individuals are using to create a false caller ID, meaning they can make the number that shows when they call appear as any number the user wishes. That can even include FBI and law-enforcement phone numbers.
“Technology is wonderful nowadays. However, it has a downside, too. Criminals are able to exploit it and it isn’t always possible to stay one step ahead,” Strength said. “This type of scenario can be extremely dangerous, especially for the officers that are responding. When officers are dispatched to a situation like that, they are expecting it to be a legitimate call and they are prepared to act accordingly.”
Strength made it clear that individuals involved in swattings can expect to be prosecuted.
After all, Martinez of Washington state is serving 30 months for his swattings. Yet he got away with his crimes for several years.
“We would definitely need to get with the prosecutors to see what we could do,” Strength said, noting that they are not clear on exactly what criminal charges would apply. Strength did say that the list would likely contain at least one felony. “This is definitely serious and we are aware of the possibilities.”
Porter, an outspoken opponent of Anonymous, believes the group is coming under greater scrutiny nationwide. And because of his opposition, he has been the target of ongoing real-life harassment, though he has made it clear that he has no intention of folding under the pressure.
“Anonymous says that they never forgive and they never forget, but the furries mean it,” Porter once said.
He believes most members of Anonymous are kids, but there are a few that may be in their late teens and early 20s.
Porter said that after his initial swatting, the persons responsible moved on to other harassment, repeatedly ordering him large quantities of pizza from his local Pizza Hut and Papa Johns, accompanied by Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Eventually Porter ended up having to call all of his local pizza delivery restaurants to advise them that he had not ordered any pizza.
The police department in Allen has launched an ongoing investigation into the fiasco.
“I’ve been told that, if they’re caught, a judge can ban them from using the Internet for rest of lives. They wouldn’t be able to use it at home, their parents couldn’t have it, friends and immediate associates wouldn’t be able to have it. They wouldn’t even be allowed to use WiFi or Internet cafes,” Porter said.
Anonymous is still considered to pose a significant threat. Members are continuing to release “full disclosures” on outspoken opponents such as Porter. They post documents detailing real names, addresses, phone numbers and other pertinent information revealing the identity of online opponents who have not often willingly given that information away.
This encourages other members to use the information to engage in real life harassment, death threats and swattings to “punish” those who speak out against them.
“We know that they swatted others and it was posted on YouTube. This isn’t a one-time occurrence by any means,” Porter said.
Fortunately, most people don’t have cause to be concerned so long as they aren’t “furries, members of Scientology or speaking out against Anonymous,” our insider with Anonymous tells us.
Let’s hope we’re not now on that list. | |
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