Swatting Attacks Increase Security Concerns Across Silicon Valley - WSJ

One January night this year an emergency dispatch operator in Palo Alto, Calif., fielded a call from a man who said he had shot his wife and then tied up his children inside his house, where he had several pipe bombs. After a tense period in which police officers surrounded the house, out came the owner, a senior Facebook Inc. executive who said there was no shooting and that he had no idea what was going on.

The call was a hoax, but not an isolated incident.

Just over two weeks later, an Instagram executive at his home in San Francisco was also the target of a swatting attack, in which the perpetrator masquerades as a certain individual and calls up local law enforcement, claiming to have committed violent crimes at the target’s address.

The incidents show why safety concerns are rising across Silicon Valley, prompting tech companies to allocate more dollars to executive security.

Tech companies have become targets in part because they have become more active in removing hate speech and disinformation from their platforms—moves that have triggered accusations of bias from those affected by their policies. The industry also is increasingly blamed on a range of issues, from privacy abuses to exacerbating income inequality.

The swatting attacks early this year came weeks after someone posted to an online message board personal details—including home addresses and names of family members—of some of the biggest figures in Silicon Valley. The list, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, also included information on journalists, celebrities and government officials. At least one of the celebrities included in the list was subsequently swatted.

The anonymous posting with the list, which has since been taken down, was hosted on the 8chan website, which describes itself as “The darkest reaches of the internet.” Long a hotbed for anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic material, 8chan was used to announce the mosque terrorist attack in New Zealand in March and a synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif., a month later.

The uptick of incidents targeting technology executives over the past year may be related to platforms removing accounts, including those belonging to criminals trafficking in hacked accounts.

The takedowns have “pissed off the bad guys,” said Samy Tarazi, a sergeant with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction includes the campuses for Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google, and other technology companies. The recent swatting attacks are still being investigated by law enforcement, but Sgt. Tarazi said they are likely retaliation for actions the technology companies have taken.

Swatting is often called a prank, but its consequences can be deadly. A perpetrator was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for launching a swatting attack in December 2017 in Wichita, Kan., against a man who was killed by police responding to the call.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said the company declined to comment about the incidents or whether it has made any changes to its security practices. Other major tech companies also declined to comment on security measures for their top executives.

The publicly disclosed security expenses for Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his family have nearly quadrupled since 2016, rising to nearly $20 million last year, according to a recent filing by the company. “He is synonymous with Facebook and, as a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly associated with, and often transferred to, Mr. Zuckerberg,” the securities filing said.

Such increases aren’t limited to Facebook. Alphabet spent $1.2 million on security services for Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018, the company stated last week in a securities filing. That is nearly four times the $322,241 spent on Mr. Pichai’s security detail in 2016.

Google’s YouTube unit was the target of the most violent incident of late involving a tech giant. In April 2018, YouTube creator Nasim Aghdam shot three people at the company’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters before killing herself. Ms. Aghdam was upset with the online streaming service, which she believed was censoring her videos.

The security spending figures may not reflect the actual amounts spent to protect those executives as many companies account for such measures differently, complicating company-to-company comparisons, said Mark Lowery, a former Secret Service agent who has consulted on corporate management protection.

Many executives pay considerable sums of their own money on security details for themselves and their families, and some companies lump executive protection expenditures with other security spending, Mr. Lowery said, “It can become more of an IRS issue than a security issue,” he said.

Multimillion-dollar security packages are the exception. Mr. Zuckerberg’s tab is the highest among publicly traded companies tracked by the compensation-data firm Equilar Inc. Next is that for Las Vegas Sands Corp. CEO Sheldon Adelson, at more than $5 million.

Swatting is hardly the only security problem facing technology executives. Last month, political activist Laura Loomer staked out Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey’s house in San Francisco to protest the suspension of conservative Twitter accounts, including her own. Ms. Loomer, who is suing Twitter over her suspension, said she found Mr. Dorsey’s address from public records. She said the police were called but didn’t arrest her because she was on public property.

Twitter, which declined to comment on Mr. Dorsey’s security, had previously said Ms. Loomer violated its hateful-conduct policy. She was also recently banned from Facebook.

The extreme responses to tech companies’ practices reflect in part how deeply their services have become embedded in the lives of users, said Chris Hoofnagle, who teaches internet law at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, because giants such as Facebook and Google have focused so relentlessly on the promise of their products and less on the risks, such actions as account takedowns are taken all the more personally.

“When the situation sours it’s actually an emotional event” for the users, he said.

—Theo Francis contributed to this article.

Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

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