South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Tech execs becoming victims of swatting attacks, police say
SAN FRANCISCO — Over the first week of November, the police in San Francisco and New York responded to a series of telephone calls claiming that hostages were being held in the homes of Adam Mosseri, a senior Facebook executive.
The calls appeared to be coming from inside the homes.
Officers arrived in force and barricaded the streets outside. Twice.
But after tense, hourslong standoffs, they realized the calls were hoaxes. There were no hostages, and no one in the homes had called the police.
Mosseri is one of a number of tech executives who have been targeted recently in so-called swatting incidents. Swatting is online lingo used to describe when people call the police with false reports of a violent crime of some sort inside a home, hoping to persuade them to send a SWAT team.
These episodes have become more common in communities rich with tech companies and their billionaire executives, like the Bay Area and Seattle, according to six police departments contacted by The New York Times.
Exact numbers are unclear, police say, because there is no central repository of information for these sorts of attacks.
But as online discourse has become more combative and more personal, some in the industry aren’t surprised that tech executives — the people who decide what is posted on social media and who is barred from it — have become regular targets.
Swattings have spiked at Facebook in particular, according to local police departments
and security officials at the company, which in recent years has cracked down on false accounts, threatening language and other types of content that violates its rules. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity surrounding the attacks.
Mosseri declined to comment, and a Facebook spokesman, Anthony Harrison, said in a statement that “because these things deal with security matters and our employees, we are unable to comment.”
The attacks have been aided by forums that have sprung up both on the public internet and on the camouflaged sites of the so-called dark web. These forums name thousands of people, from high-ranking executives to their extended families, who could be targets, providing cellphone numbers, home addresses and other information. Some even discuss techniques that can be used — like cheap, online technology that can spoof a phone number and make the police believe a 911 call is coming from a target’s home.
In the eight months since one online forum was started, nearly 3,000 people have joined.
“Who should we do
next?” read one message on the forum last month. The responses included gun emojis — the symbol, in swatting forums, for an attack in which the police were successfully called to the target’s home. Many of the responses were laced with profanity, as well as suggestions for ex-girlfriends who should be swatted.
One forum names at least two dozen Facebook employees as potential targets. They range from executives to product engineers. Some forum participants said that they had been barred from Facebook or Instagram, and that Facebook employees were fair game because they “think they are god.”
Swatting started in the combative world of online gaming. It was a way to terrorize someone more famous, get even with a rival or retaliate against someone with different political views.
Provoking a heavily armed police response presents obvious risks. Last year, a 26-year-old California man was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for calling in dozens of fake emergency calls, including one that led to the fatal police shooting of Andrew Finch, a Kansas resident.