specialreports.dailydot.comHow to Destroy an American Family

Trending Tech Politics Pop Culture Memes Labor Hacks TikTok AboutContact Jobs Terms Of Use Privacy Policy Trending Tech Politics Pop Culture Memes Labor Hacks TikTok AboutContact Jobs Terms Of Use Privacy Policy Newsletter My Account‘It does not end well’: Open AI’s latest release compared to sci-fi film ‘Her’ Ex-Trump aide jokes about giving homeless counterfeit money to get them arrested ‘LOG OFF’: Right-wing divided over X reinstatement of accused underage groomer Ali Alexander Block2024: Why are people blocking celebrities on social media? RFK Jr.’s campaign leans into brain worm revelation, considers ‘uncensored scientific research platform’ on brainworm.com Deplatformed: Biden’s Buttigieg gaffe won’t die ‘Did it just explode in your hands?’: YouTuber’s Cybertruck tuneup over malfunctioning windshield wiper goes haywire ‘They should be ashamed’: Trump doubles down on attacks against Jewish Biden supporters Fetterman praises Florida’s lab-grown meat ban, which aims to stop the ‘elite’ from forcing ‘the world to eat fake meat and bugs’ ‘Go study abroad’: Republicans introduce bill to send pro-Palestine college protestors to Gaza ‘The Michael Jordan of racism’: Ann Coulter condemned after telling Vivek Ramaswamy he never had her vote ‘because you’re an Indian’ ‘Crushing human creativity’: Apple’s new iPad Pro commercial featuring hydraulic press falls flat Photo by Kyle La Mere How to destroy an American family The Straters’ lives have been devastated by relentless cyberattacks. And there’s nothing they can do about it. Aaron Sankin William Turton Tech Posted on Nov 24, 2015 Updated on May 27, 2021, 2:44 pm CDT Mom is dead, and they did it.” An emergency dispatcher hears this message just before 4am on a Thursday morning. It’s been rendered anonymous by a text-to-voice service designed for the deaf. In short, robotic bursts, the caller tells a terrifying tale: 17-year-old Blair Strater, high on PCP, has beaten his mother to death and is threatening to take his own life with a rifle. As officers make their way to the Straters’ single-family home, an official calls the house. Amy Strater answers. Her son Blair has never taken PCP in his life, she attempts to explain, and there are no firearms in the house. Just to be safe, the emergency responder asks her to come downstairs and meet the officers assembled in her front yard. Standing at the edge of her doorstop, neighbors peeking through curtains across the tree-lined street, Amy adjusts her glasses and tries not to think about how she has to get up for work in a few hours. She asks the policemen precisely what she needs to do to prove she hasn’t just been murdered. Holding out her arm, she sighs as they take her blood pressure. Telling the story in her kitchen two years later, Amy brushes her short brown hair to the side and takes a long drag on her electronic cigarette. She chuckles. Paul, her husband, lets out a guffaw. The whole thing seems ridiculous. You’ve gotta joke about it,” she says. You’ve gotta have fun with it.” We have to use humor to deal with it,” agrees Paul, who’s recovering from a recent eye surgery. His oversized sunglasses project an air of nonchalance belied by the nervous edge to his voice. If you don’t laugh,” he adds, you’re going to go put a gun in your mouth.” On the surface, the Straters seem like your typical American sitcom family. Their two-story house in Oswego, an idyllic Midwestern suburb an hour outside Chicago, rests between a golf course and a corn field. Paul plays the goofy but opinionated husband: He went back to school to get a degree in broadcasting when his television career stalled at age 41. He now works behind the camera at a local public television station, broadcasting Friday nights from high school football games. Mom is dead, and they did it.” Amy is the good-natured but sharp-tongued wife. Until recently, she served as director of decision support and population analytics at Ingalls Health System, a network of hospitals based in nearby Harvey, Illinois. A biostatistician, Amy tracked the health of patients after they left the hospital. Middle-schooler Jordan is the shy but bubbly daughter, and Blair, now in his early 20s, is the socially awkward but impassioned computer geek. Since 2010, the Straters have been under assault from an online campaign of ever-increasing harassment—prank deliveries, smear attacks, high-profile hacks, and threats of violence against schools and law enforcement officials in their name—and it’s slowly torn them apart. Masterminding it all, Blair charges, is a teenage computer hacker from Finland, at war with him over a seemingly minor dispute spun completely out of control. His family is just collateral damage. You probably don’t know the name Julius Kivimaki, but there’s a good chance you know his work. Last year, he was one of the hackers who stole Christmas . On Dec. 25, just as kids were unwrapping and booting up their new consoles for the first time, the online networks for Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network were brought down by a pair of coordinated denial-of-service ( DDoS ) attacks, overwhelming their servers with data requests that rendered their systems largely unusable for days. The hackers used a botnet—a global network of malware-infected slave” devices secretly doing a hacker’s bidding—of over 150,000 infected computers. A computer security researcher estimated the attacks cost Microsoft and Sony well over $40,000 an hour. A group calling itself Lizard Squad took credit for the attack. The hacking collective coalesced in 2014 on the forums of Darkode, an online black market where users could buy and sell hacking services and malware. (Darkode was shuttered after a international law enforcement effort this July.) While Lizard Squad members are clear inheritors of the legacy left by infamous hacking collectives like Anonymous and Legion of Doom, their attacks aren’t inherently political. Their motivation?Chaos is entertainment .” A few days after the attack, a member of Lizard Squad beamed in from his native Finland for an on-camera interview with the U.K.-based Sky News. It was Kivimaki. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngp4kSB5z80 [We did it] mostly to raise awareness for ourselves,” Kivimaki said. Also, one of the aspects here was raising awareness of the low state of computer security at these companies. These companies make tens of millions every month from their subscriber fees… They should have more than enough funding to be able to protect against these attacks.” Do you feel guilty that you taken the enjoyment of gaming away from more than 100 million people?” the host asked. I’d be rather worried if those people didn’t have anything better to do than to play games on their consoles on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,” he replied with a smirk. I can’t really feel bad that I might have forced a couple of kids to spend time with their families rather than playing games.” Kivimaki’s first brush with law enforcement came on Sept. 23, 2013. Police in Helsinki arrested him for an extensive array of crimes—none of which had to do with Lizard Squad, which didn’t exist at the time, or the Straters. In a series of interviews with the Daily Dot, Kivimaki wasn’t particularly forthcoming with personal details. He’s currently 18 years old and has been a computer hacker for nearly half his life. His lengthy 2013 indictment serves as an incomplete guide to some of the alleged exploits of his previous hacking group, Hack the Planet. Named after a TV show in 1995 techno-thriller Hackers, Hack the Planet formed as a collection of self-styled digital activists fighting government and corporate anti-piracy efforts. Chaos is Entertainment.” Finnish police charged Kivimaki with breaking into computer systems around the world, including the website of MIT, using a suite of hacking software developed by Hack the Planet. Once in the systems, the group installed programs turning the infected computers into a...