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Imagine you’re sitting at your home, watching the television, and all of a sudden, the spotlight flashes through your window. “Get your hands in the air and exit the property!” shouts a trained law enforcement official in shining military gear. How would you react in such a scenario if you never committed a crime in your life? All of this happens due to a swatting attack by someone who hijacks your smart home gadgets and reports a serious emergency case.
However, you can use US proxies servers to hide your IP address and secure your personal details from the swatting attackers. Moreover, the US proxy list has several servers that work as a gateway between the internet and the users. Therefore, it helps you to keep away from brute force attacks by encrypting user data, location, device ID, etc.
What is a Swatting Attack?
Swatting describes the act of making fictitious phone calls to emergency services to report serious crimes. Swatters accomplish this by fraudulently reporting a violent emergency scenario, such as a shooting or a hostage crisis, to emergency lines such as 911. It is intended to trick emergency services into dispatching a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit to attend to the alleged emergency.
Swatters frequently regard their actions as a joke, but they can have profound effects. Swatting takes up critical law enforcement time and resources which reduces their capacity to respond to real crises. Moreover, there have even been swatting cases where law enforcement officers have been wounded. In some cases, law enforcement has shot and killed the swatting victim.
Swatting attacks & Smart Home Devices
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned those who use smart home devices, saying that criminals are hijacking victims’ smart devices, including video and audio capable home surveillance devices, to carry out swatting attacks.
When a prank call connects to the emergency helpline, confusion from homeowners or responding officers has resulted in violent consequences and pulls limited resources away from valid emergencies.
In most cases, revenge drives swatting, especially among gamers, but it can also be used as a harassment tool or perpetuate a prank on someone. Some users choose comfort over security; thus, cybercriminals or swatters take advantage of their convenience. Typically users may set a weak password for many online services or social media platforms, which leads to data breaches.
Data breaches are a continuous source of personal information which the swatters can get quickly through different channels or techniques. Swatters use several ways to gather the data and hack their smart home devices to create a perfect scenario for swatting attacks.
How do Swatters Gather Information?
Swatters require specific information about their victim, such as a home address, email, security gadgets, etc. There are a few different ways to attain personal information, such as:
Doxing
People post their personal information like home and business addresses on social media platforms or other public platforms; those looking to commit swatting attacks can get that information and use it against the victim.
Social media
It is a fact that many people themselves post their information on different social media platforms. A victim might put their check-in into a restaurant, location, and post like bought a new house on social media platforms. Then, an intellectual swatter could sift through accounts and pull out the data they require for potential swatting calls.
Social engineering
It is another tactic most swatters use to gather data to make such calls and create a good crime scene. Hackers and malicious actors utilize social engineering to access their victims’ passwords, login data, and sensitive financial information.
On the other hand, the swatters can use this strategy to obtain a home address or other location necessary for swatting attacks. Swatters might present as a technical support representative, customer service officer, or even an authority to squeeze out the required information at a victim’s job.
What is a Brute-force attack?
A brute force attack is a technique for obtaining confidential user data such as usernames, passwords, passphrases, or PINs. These attacks often use a script or bot to guess the requested information until it is confirmed as the correct password.
Swatters use a Brute-force attack technique.
A criminal or cybercriminal use Brute-force attacker techniques to access protected data through user credentials. You may believe that a password protects your data; research has proven that a brute-force attack can crack an eight-digit password in about six hours.
If their first attempt fails to get the correct password or the desired information, they keep trying with different accounts until they crack the password or get blocked by the sites.
After getting blocked, the attacker will use a different account and different IP addresses to crack the password. They might use robust proxy networks to hide their identity and keep attacking the victim’s site, network, or account.
Once they crack the password or get the required information, the attacker has complete control over all digitally connected devices, such as cameras, audio devices, etc.
So, ensure that the password has more characters, numbers, symbols, use multifactor authentication, and set limited login attempts, leading to more time to brute force crack or maybe doesn’t even crack.
Conclusion
If you want to be secure on the internet or prevent brute force attacks, use US proxy servers that will hide personal data, even your IP address. It is also used to prevent snooping eyes from seeing your transactions, then use your proxy server to encrypt your web requests.
However, there are some other factors that will secure you from these attackers, such as creating strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, changing passwords frequently, etc.
