Say you’re relaxing at home one day. It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon, so naturally, you decide to stay inside and play some Call of Duty multiplayer. You’re tearing it up, winning every match in your lobby, when one particular player becomes especially upset at your elite FPS skills. He subsequently messages to you that you are going to be “swatted,” among other profanities. Of course, you ignore this. What’s swatting anyways? So you carry on without much regard to that threat. 10 minutes later there’s a knock on the door. The cops are there, and according to them you shot up the block with an assault rifle and were hiding in the residence with hostages. Not even an hour after that, you find yourself in custody while the police sort out what exactly happened since they found nothing of suspicion at all at your place (hopefully). Upon your release, you hear and read of one specific term as the incident circulates in the local news: swatting.
Swatting is essentially when a person, the swatter, calls the police anonymously with the goal of summoning the SWAT team to what they claim is their address. In the spirit of swatting, it is not actually their own address, but the address of someone they want to be swatted. The result of filing such a false emergency call is not always going to be the SWAT team breaking down the victim’s door; you’d need a really outrageous and crazy story to tell the police for that to happen. Oftentimes, there will just be ordinary police officers coming over to investigate. Swatters don’t call the SWAT team with the intention of actually getting the victim arrested for criminal charges. It’s purely for pranking purposes, and a huge scare and inconvenience for the targeted victim, as well as stressing out the emergency response teams.
Swatting is not necessarily something new; it’s been a known issue for a few years now, with 2014 being a year when it gained significant publicity with the swatting of the residences of high-profile celebrities, and several arrests being made for swatters. Today, it remains a prominent issue in the domain of cybersecurity, with incidents of swatting being reported quite frequently.
In May of 2014, a 16 year old from Ottawa pleaded guilty to 60 charges for 30 incidents of fake emergency calls, some of which included “uttering death threats, conveying false information with intent to alarm, public mischief, and false bomb threats.” These 30 swatting incidents occurred all across North America. In the same year, another arrest occurred in Vancouver, where a teenager was found guilty for swatting residents as far away as Florida. One common trend with swatters, at least in Canada, is that most are minors. Although many swatters have been arrested, many more have escaped prosecution with ease. The common case with swatting calls is that the origin of the call cannot be traced, a significant hole in the cybersecurity capabilities of the police.
The recent cases of young teenagers being arrested for swatting should be a cause for major alarm for law enforcement and security in not just Canada, but on an international level as well. The fact of the matter is that people now have the capabilities and resources to cause major chaos from thousands of kilometres of away, and likely face no consequences whatsoever. It’s not exactly rocket science to swat someone; anyone with the right motives could do it (don’t try this at home, kids). All a swatter needs is a method of hiding their phone number, a target address, and a really crazy convincing story to tell the police. That’s it. No hacking or anything of that nature involved whatsoever, despite the misconception of swatters as hackers. With the increasing accessibility of the internet, even those with very little technical knowledge can swat if they stumble upon the right information.
One of the main problems arising from the increasing number of swatting incidents is the diversion of emergency response services from actual emergencies in order to deal with these hoaxes. Legitimate crime incidents are now being sidelined, as well as any fires or medical emergencies that could have otherwise utilized the services of the firefighters and paramedics that were called to the hoax incident. As a result, some police departments are justifying the investment in more “resources,” which essentially means increased spending on the militarization of police forces. This has been an issue primarily in the United States, where military tactics have been used more and more often to achieve objectives in police operations. Of course, swatting isn’t the one reason enabling police forces to invest in the militarization of their operations, but it certainly is a good excuse. This is a cause for major concern as the likelihood of a miscommunication during an investigation causing injury or death is increasing.
What does the future hold for swatting? One main concern about the swatting is the potential for something a lot more serious than a prank call. The possibilities of exploiting the emergency response system are quite endless. With rapid advancements in technology and the increasing role of the internet in every service conceivable, one can only hope that this recent surge of swatting kick starts an increasing investment in cybersecurity, so when the real cybercrimes come rolling in, we’ll be ready.
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