Get the latest tech news
The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real
The inside story of the teenager whose “swatting” calls sent armed police racing into hundreds of schools nationwide—and the private detective who tracked him down.
Armed with little more than his monstrous voice, an internet-based calling application routed through an anonymous proxy server, and a recording of gunfire taken from the video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Torswats terrorized half the state, paralyzing schools, weaponizing civilians’ own police forces against them, temporarily shutting down entire communities, again and again and again. For months leading up to that May swatting offensive, Dennis had been tracing Torswats’ online footprints, tracking down his various social media accounts, meticulously tying those clues to real-world identifying information and sharing the results with law enforcement. Around 2007, when he was 19, Dennis met a hacker named Dshocker on IRC, and the two developed a system for cleverly exploiting stolen and leaked credit card numbers: They’d order something via UPS and send it to the cardholder’s own address to skirt fraud detection.
Or read this on Wired
