The dangerous trio of twitch, streaming, and swatting
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The dangerous trio of twitch, streaming, and swatting
It is arguably just a synchronicity, but I’ve been thinking about how two Twitch-related events that happened this week are connected.
The big one is, of course, Amazon’s $970 million purchase of the live-streaming video game website, which I chatted about with David Gura.
The second is a smaller event: the shutdown of schools and some buildings in Littleton, Colorado. Littleton may sound familiar because it’s near Columbine, where the Columbine High School Massacre occurred in 1999. It’s a place where you could probably forgive law enforcement for reacting immediately and intensely to a 9-1-1 caller who claimed to have shot two co-workers and to be holding more hostage.
When that call came in Wednesday, it was taken seriously. But it was apparently fake — an example of something called “swatting.” Swatting is when someone with some technical chops calls 9-1-1 and makes it look like the call is coming from a victim’s phone or a location in a building where something has gone very wrong, sending large numbers of law enforcement to a place where they’re not actually needed. Hilarious, right?
Admittedly the popular — get this — video game streamer and Twitch user Jordan Mathewson, a.k.a. “Kootra” did crack a smile when heavily armed officers busted into his office in search of a shooter. Maybe it was because he realized his Twitch viewers were seeing the whole thing via his live webcam. Or maybe he was actually amused by the irony or meta layers of having your first person shooter video game session be interrupted by actual real life rifles. But Mathewson looks nervous more than anything. Here’s the video, where officers burst in on the gamer just after he says “I think we’re being swatted.”
Police figured out that the call was fake and luckily there were no injuries. But businesses were evacuated, and parents got a message from a nearby school saying their kids were under lockdown because of an “active shooter situation.” Law enforcement now think they’ve found a Twitter account connected with a person who may have made the phone call.
Swatting, which is apparently on the rise, is not a good prank. It sends heavily armed law enforcement looking for possible armed resistance to a place where there is none. That’s insanely wasteful and dangerous. What is interesting about this case is that people were watching someone’s live feed as it all happened.
For a cybercriminal, hacker or troll, the promise of a big live audience via a live streaming website like Twitch could be really attractive. And that might be bad news.
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