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Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

(www.wired.com)
242 points LinuxBender | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 00:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ToucanLoucan ◴[18 Nov 24 01:04 UTC] No.42168777[source]▶
Okay so like, genuinely not trying to do a "back in my day" fuckin thing here, but also: what the fuck is wrong with kids? Back when I was coming up, pranking at it's absolute worst was like, filling a dudes shoes with yogurt in the locker room, or like, putting plastic bugs in people's desks n shit. Why the fuck are teenagers trying to get each other murdered by cops!?
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burnished ◴[18 Nov 24 01:13 UTC] No.42168818[source]▶
I suspect its more about how much national information you're exposed to today than any sort of time based moral failing.
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Loughla ◴[18 Nov 24 01:15 UTC] No.42168838[source]▶
I cannot be convinced that swatting is something that used to happen. Is there a history of this?

I legit do not remember seeing anything on the evening national news about that in the past, like from before 2000.

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1. LinuxBender ◴[18 Nov 24 01:28 UTC] No.42168916[source]▶
The earliest it could have started is when SS7 links and the internet were bridged by dodgy / nefarious owners of said SS7 links. That started to take off around the mid 90's to spam phones with spoofed numbers. I wanted to get the SS7 links terminated but my boss in the wireless industry, tied heavily to SS7 would not let me because they were paying their bill. It would have been one phone call to terminate many of them.

I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.