Swatting – the new age hackers favorite past-time
A new kind of telephone fraud has recently emerged and is taking on a rapidly increasing role in many a teen hacker’s 
daily plots. It is called: Swatting. What Swatting entails is exploiting a weakness in the way the 911 system handles calls from Internet-based phone services.
These attacks are called “swatting” because armed police SWAT teams usually respond to these online threats. Swatting seems to be virtually unstoppable, and an Associated Press investigation found that budget-strapped 911 centres are essentially defenseless, unless they go through a complete overhaul of their computer systems.
By entering bogus information about their location, the hacker is able to make it seem to the 911 operator as if they are calling from inside the ‘targets’ home. According to prosecutors familiar with this new style of hacking, perpetrators tend to pick targets at random.
Last March, a teenage hacker was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to five felony counts, including computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence and falsely reporting a crime.
According to authorities, a separate, multistate case (prosecuted by federal authorities in Dallas), eight people were charged with orchestrating up to 300 “swatting” calls to victims they met on telephone party chat lines. “The three ringleaders were each sentenced to five years in prison. Two others were sentenced to 2-1/2 years. One defendant pleaded guilty last week and could get a 13-year sentence. The remaining two are set to go on trial this month.”
So, what would be the solution to this ever increasing problem? According to a prosecutor familiar with this type of crime, “upgrading the communications centres’ computers to flash an Internet caller’s IP address could be helpful in thwarting fraudulent calls. An even simpler fix, tweaking the computers to identify calls from Internet telephone services and flash the name of the service provider to dispatchers, can cost under $5,000, but is usually still too costly for many communications centres.”
Swatting calls place an immense strain on responding departments. A typical Swat call will cost the department $14,700.
Investigators say swatters are usually motivated by a mixture of ego and malice, a desire for revenge and domination over rivals.
