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Canadian Teen Arrested For Calling In 30+ Swattings, Bomb Threats
tsu doh nimh (609154) writes "A 16-year-old male from Ottawa, Canada has been arrested for allegedly making at least 30 fraudulent calls — including bomb threats and 'swattings' — to emergency services across North America over the past few months. Canadian media isn't identifying the youth because of laws that prevent the disclosure, but the alleged perpetrator was outed in a dox on Pastebin that was picked up by journalist Brian Krebs, who was twice the recipient of attempted swat raids at the hand of this kid. From the story: 'I told this user privately that targeting an investigative reporter maybe wasn't the brightest idea, and that he was likely to wind up in jail soon. But @ProbablyOnion was on a roll: That same day, he hung out his for-hire sign on Twitter, with the following message: "want someone swatted? Tweet me their name, address and I'll make it happen."'"
yeah, horrible phone companies, allowing a company to put their corporate number for the caller ID for all calls.
Fine if they put whatever they want in the 'caller id' that is transmitted inband at the start of the call; they should NOT be allowed to use a custom ANI; the ANI number which is used for long distance billing should be unique to the line and should be the number that calls into that line.
The police ought to be provided access to and use the more reliable ANI Billing number (Automatic Number Identification), instead of the relying upon the possibly user-spoofable Caller ID.
A payphone, another's work or home landline, or another's cell phone. Someone elses cell phone will still work for 9-1-1 after the owner has deactivated service.
A friend of mine in Europe has 911 as the first three digits of the phone number.
Some phones will accept dialing the number without a SIM card inserted, because it starts with 911.
If you are interested in actually learning more about such techniques I would suggest typing "call spoofing" into your favorite search engine.
Thanks for the reminder. Congresswoman Annie Kuster has been robocalling us with the CallerID spoofed to 'WIRELESS CALLER' in the past few days - been meaning to look that up.
Not that I should dare to question my betters, of course.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you think the poor and ignorant cause harm, you should see what the wealthy and powerful do. Coming from Old Money (great-grandparent a wealthy business owner and profligate gambler, grandparent a member of all the right/wrong clubs, parents in senior civil service, £30k/year private school, &c.), I was surrounded by destructive idiots with obscene wealth who were there on anything but their own merits.
I'm all in favour of personal responsibility, but that means considering the complete chain and gamut of consequences of your actions, not merely what flows immediately from your behaviour. Those who use a snapshot of any complex system to derive a solution do a disservice to their brain.