If ever there was a case for checking your facts this is it, in a strange manner. Some poor fella that works for a gas company started having the phone ring off the wall with people threatening him and his wife. Why? A group of anti-Scientology hackers thought he was a hacker for the other side. It seems that they were miles from right.
From Recordnet.com:
A 59-year-old man and his wife received dozens of threatening telephone calls from anti-Scientology provocateurs after their home address and telephone number – and her Social Security number – were posted online by hackers who mistook the man for a pro-Scientology hacker, he said.
“Friday we started getting phone calls, me and the wife,” John Lawson of Stockton said Wednesday. “They’d just say, ‘We’re going to get you,’ this and that.”
The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. field clerk said he had “no clue what was going on” until a staff writer for Wired News, the online side of Wired Magazine, called.
The writer, Ryan Singel, said a group of hackers called the “g00ns” believed Lawson to be a hacker who disrupted a Web site frequented by members of Anonymous, a loose league of Internet troublemakers most recently engaged in upsetting the Church of Scientology. The g00ns are skilled hackers and were “pretty convinced that from their forensic work they had found the right guy,” Singel said.
Um, oops? It’s bad enough that they were engaging in threats (never smart) but, to do it to someone who had nothing to do with the entire affair. No word on if the cops will be able to run this to ground.
[tags]Scientology Hacking, John Lawson, Mistaken Identity[/tags]