I'll never forget it, he not only told me my mother's name, but also read off her social security number and told me it was 'disgusting pig' she was on welfare. (born with CP)

That shock (the shock of involvement of family) led me to ditching all my research and moving on to writing papers on Cisco routers.

That was back in 2001, finding identities and ssn's wasn't quite so easy; especially for an invalid mother who had never ventured near a keyboard. On reflection, I suppose it wasn't too hard even then to obtain info if you had money, but still creepy to have some international guy threaten your life/your mother's life for gathering info.

This actually happened again recently, but the shock wasn't quite there. This time, my girlfriend was attacked by an angry blackhat SEO because I was treading on his niche territory. Its not too hard to tie adwords campaigns > domains > domain whois > real name > facebook/social networking > family and get info on them these days. This guy contacted me first too, but moved on to harassing my girlfriend. Domain parking, go go. Its not worth the $15 a month to get harassed. I'm pretty sure he got my adsense account banned (suspicious clicks) + had something going on to click my ads automatically and waste my money (I had a 15% CTR at one point). Also my wordpress had someone logged into my admin at one point, but I've basically turned my linode into knox since then.

She didn't quite seem to understand why I was in a panic over the situation...