Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

To me the scariest support email would be discovering that the customer's 'bug' is actually evidence that they are in mortal danger, and not being sure the assailant wasn't reading everything I'm telling the customer.

I thought perhaps this was going that way up until around the echo | bash bit.

I don't think this one is particularly scary. I've brushed much closer to Death even without spear-phishing being involved.

View on HN

Several 911 calls of people sounding to be ordering a pizza but calling for help, where they attacker can also hear the caller. Example: https://youtu.be/UiWTmUNDFRg

Just last night YouTube suggested that YouTube clip of the woman whose lawyer in a restraining order/domestic violence case teleconference told the judge she was afraid her client’s husband was in the house with her and the judge made him take his computer outside where police were waiting to arrest him.

Personally I think the judge should have made the woman go outside first, but “inside a suspect’s house” is statistically more dangerous than a traffic stop, which is the second most dangerous place for a cop to be.

I was more thinking of soon-to-be political prisoners but there are a lot of situations that match what I said.

The scary part is that it takes one afternoon at most to scale this kind of attack to thousands of potential victims, and that even a 5% success rate yields tens of successful attacks.

Not helped by the civilizational-infrastructure absence of a role containing someone smart that you can take a bizarre situation to, and expect to get something more than a brush-off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com