121–130 of 164 posts
This seems like such needless hassle and pain for everyone involved. If these companies just adopted a username system like most video games, where the user gets to pick any name they want and some arbitrary numbers get tacked on to the end, then this situation would be totally solved.
I grabbed a short 2-letter Twitter handle within a few months after they launched. A few years ago I had someone used SIM hijacking to steal access to my phone number. This failed to get access to my Twitter account because I never set up a recovery phone number, however he got access to my Facebook and a few other accounts. I got T-Mobile to fix the SIM swap, but after 3 nights of harassment I just changed my handle…
IMO you shouldn't have given in. You should have been extremely petty here on principal - the situation calls for it.
My fellow Europeans: Is mobile phone number spoofing like this possible over here, too?
It wasn’t spoofing per se that caused the word “deadly” appear in this article’s title.
> Swatters place hoax calls to local police departments, provoking heavily armed SWAT teams to storm the homes of their victims. Haters have swatted online influencers, streamers on Twitch , and prominent figures in the tech industry, including Facebook executives and the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. In 2017, the police in Wichita, Kansas, fatally shot a man after they were summoned by a swatting attack over an o…
I guess you could argue that the only reason that people troll is because they are "unhinged" but that is a bit too hand wavy for my tastes.
Yes another reason people should leave these corporate run media sites.
The common thread among most stories like this is the spoof-ability of phone numbers. Telecom companies must make changes to prevent this kind of spoofing. Honestly, I think if telecom companies could be sued for damages caused by this kind of thing (not to mention spam) then I think the problem would get solved very quickly. The only reason it hasn't been solved yet is most of the cost and pain is borne by others.
> Telecom companies must make changes to prevent this kind of spoofing. Traditional phone companies absolutely should do a better job vs spoofing (and I believe there is supposed to be at least some progress there via STIR/SHAKEN in the US at least), but I'm a lot more inclined to blame services and particularly armed response services that still treat them as secure in a way they have long long LOOONNNGGG since prov…
Yeah, I've suggested this very thing myself on several occasions, but basically people who are against engaging in self-defense and prefer to use police officers as their own personal security are dead set against any kind of reform on this point. You're really not going to get any kind of reform on this point until it's more than just little people who are being inconvenienced by this. Basically unless and until SWAT shoots someone "who matters" it won't change... because some people are REAL sure they need a militarized police force who can kick in your door at any time on the word of an anonymous jackass on the other end of an unsecured line.
5 years in jail only? How is this fair? He caused a death. By choice. By design.
That said... I wonder if the deceased's estate has filed a civil suit against this jerk? Would serve him right to lose everything he's got.
I grabbed a short 2-letter Twitter handle within a few months after they launched. A few years ago I had someone used SIM hijacking to steal access to my phone number. This failed to get access to my Twitter account because I never set up a recovery phone number, however he got access to my Facebook and a few other accounts. I got T-Mobile to fix the SIM swap, but after 3 nights of harassment I just changed my handle…
Even 3 letter handles can be a bit of a drag, when random tweets get chopped off and only the first 3 letters of other twitter handles happen to match
I really enjoy cases of swatting because it's a Confused Deputy problem but with actual confused deputies! Police organizations are usually pretty primitively organized. They don't have the concept of studying a common body of work or anything. So they suck at what they do and they don't get better at it.