What is swatting hacking

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Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. Tyler Barriss. Sergey Vovnendo vs. Notable Swatting Statistics. How To Prevent Swatting. Simple processes and best practices users can take to prevent swatting include:. Privacy Settings. Switch Up Your Passwords. Avoid Oversharing.

In the event an attacker is able to launch a swatting attack, follow this three-step process:. Remain Calm. Report It. How Fortinet Can Help. Quick Links. Online Demo Explore key features and capabilities, and experience user interfaces. Resource Center Download from a wide range of educational material and documents. Free Trials Test our products and solutions. Contact Sales Have a question? The FBI said there were "deadly" risks. Shouted insults. You may also be interested in:. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

Andrew Finch was shot at his front door on 28 December in Wichita, Kansas. Related Topics. FBI Cyber-security. Published 23 November Swatting follows a basic and fairly simple pattern. The attackers place a call to a law enforcement agency local to their victim. They report that a particularly gruesome crime or imminent threat is taking place or about to take place at the victim's home; often, they'll claim a hostage situation is in progress, and, to make sure the responding law enforcement team is particularly primed for conflict, they may imply that one of the hostages has already been killed, or is about to be.

There are a variety of techniques swatters use to pull off their attacks. Obviously in order to successfully swat someone, you need to know where they live; that's why swatting goes hand-in-hand with doxing , the practice of discovering and revealing personal information like home addresses of individuals without their consent.

Swatters will often begin their quest by seeking to dox their victims, and sometimes doxers will publicly post or sell people's personal information in the hopes that others will take up the baton and swat them. Swatters also need to disguise their own identity, both to make their initial call more believable and to ensure that they don't end up getting in trouble once the deception has been revealed.

Swatters will generally use caller ID spoofing , a relatively simple technique that makes it appear that their call is coming from somewhere else; if they've managed to dox the victim's phone number, it's common to try to trick operators into believing the call is coming from the victims themselves, which heightens the realism.

Swatters also make use of teletypewriter TTY relay services , which are intended to relay text messages from deaf or hard-of-hearing users as voice calls to a third party. Because TTY services are required to keep calls and callers confidential, this exploitation adds an extra layer of anonymity to the process. None of these techniques require much by way of resources or technical skills, but they can go a long way towards shielding the perpetrators from consequences.

We'll discuss some specific high-profile instances of swatting in a moment, but it's worth discussing the history of the practice a bit in order to understand the types of people who are frequent swatting targets.

As we discussed, swatting doesn't really take much technical acumen to pull off; nevertheless, it first become popular in online, tech-focused spaces, like among hackers and in the hypercompetitive world of videogaming streams. Because streamers will provide an audio or video of themselves along with their gaming stream, if their rivals swatted them, both the attackers and other viewers at home would be able to watch the chaos when police arrived, adding a voyeuristic aspect to the attack.

High-profile female streamers in particular found themselves targets. Once established in those communities, the practice spread. For instance, a number of social media executives were swatted by people bitter that they had been banned from various platforms.

Some swatters have political agendas as well; one attack, perhaps predictably, targeted a Congresswoman who introduced a bill to make swatting a felony.