Somehow a fascinating irony that today's criminals don't have to shake up their victims themselves anymore. They just sit in their armchairs letting tax payers finance their personal raid squads.

I am sure that when this incident finally shows up in some police statistic it goes down as a "potential risk scenario" justifying even more funds for the militarization of police forces.

>Obviously, this was not the case, and nobody was harmed during the SWATing.

Except if you had a dog, in which case it would (routinely) be shot to death.

Also imaging the unsuspecting guy inside the house, say, cleaning his gun or something, or even playing Nerf gun with his child and seen through the window.

That seems like a bad quote to base your point on, as he wasn't claiming that nobody would ever be harmed in a similar scenario, just that nobody was harmed in this one.

Hence the "Except if" with which I started my comment.

I wanted to make the point that even if this one was a peaceful case of SWATing, an awful lot of them are not.

Link should be http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybe...

Thanks, I was wondering when the heroin was going to come into the story.

Brian Krebs does some awesome work stirring up the hacking underworld. He also does some good write ups on ATM hacking, bot nets, Russian crime syndicates, and anything else that the mass security media sometimes glosses over.

It seems that the only reason he got the drop on the conspirators was that they posted about it publicly. What happens when the conspirators don't leave a huge paper trail to give to the police beforehand?

No cowards = no rulers. Move on, citizens, this was an non-existent unauthorized thought that you haven't seen.

Is there some sort of check police departments could do to detect spoofed numbers on SWAT team requests?

Brian Krebs is a great guy and a great reporter. However, he's not a hacker.

Well, he not a jet ski either, but so what? Im sure he is not a lot of things.

Does he claim to be a hacker? I didn't see that in the article.

All I can tell, from your post and having a quick read of the article, is that for some reason you want to undermine the article, by questioning hacker credentials the author seems to have not actually claimed himself. Indeed, you appear to have made that criteria and designation up yourself.

So my question to you is: why do you want to undermine this man or / and his story?

All that aside, if you read the About page...

http://krebsonsecurity.com/about/

... certainly fits my idea of a "hacker".

"It wasn’t until 2001 — when my entire home network was overrun by a Chinese hacking group — that I became intensely interested in computer security. I had been monkeying with a default installation of Red Hat Linux (6.2) on an old Hewlett-Packard system, because for some reason I had it in my head that it would be fun to teach myself how to turn the spare computer into an oversized firewall [ah, the irony]. That is, until the Lion Worm came around and locked me out of my system. Twice."

"Monkeying"? Linux on an old machine? "turn the spare computer into an oversized firewall"? If thats not hacking, I don't know what is.

Am I now allowed to down vote your post, BTW?

Yeah, sure - I've been following him for years but had never heard him get down and dirty before. Somehow never read that page either.

I was confused for a moment what you were going for. The title doesn't have the word 'hacker'. There are six instances of the word 'hacker' on his site, none of which refer to him. What is your point OP? Do you only read stuff that refers to people who belong to your narrow definition of that cult? Is someone who paints a 'hacker'? What about someone who tinkers with words ?

So, down-voter, you're saying he is a hacker? Would you care to back up your claim?

No, of course not, if you had any intelligence whatsoever you would have already stated your case rather than down-voting.

Now you've gone and given us a comment to actually downvote. If I could, I would. "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." [1]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Downvotes = disagreement. you also stated a subjective opinion in the post about this reporter being a great guy - it's legitimate to disagree with that.

(no, I'm not the downvoter.)

I'm guessing you were downvoted because you aren't really contributing to the conversation, but are instead actively trolling with that post.

The title's changed. Not sure if it changed before or after the original down vote.