Vigilante Justice Gone Wrong: Comcast Tech Violates Privacy For Personal Vendetta
This story is the perfect case of why vigilante justice can go very wrong. It is an increasingly common trend to use the internet to exact revenge, or to find justice where it would otherwise be unobtainable.
A man by the name of Mark R. (Xbox alias Sir Lagzalot) while playing some undisclosed game was sent an unreasonable number of packets from a few clients. These clients were performing what is known as a Denial of Service attacks, flooding his connection with useless data in order to strangle data bandwidth away from good data. As you can imagine, Mark R. was rightfully upset. This is where things took a turn for the worse. Mark R. posted this gloat to the Halo 3 forums:
I work for Comcast as a tier 2.5 support agent, which essentially means im one of the top 1% elitest agents, I proceeded to input his ip address into a program we have called SERVICE VISIBILITY PORTAL -- SVP for short -- and it brought up his account, address phone number, daddy's credit card info -- the whole nine yards, I decided that since this kid was indeed involved in illegal activity I'd give his daddy a call.
Mark R. essentially used his position as a tech to violate the privacy of an entire family, not just the boy who DoS'ed him. As further proof of his actions and ability to pillage account information, he included two screenshots of the SVP interface (included below).
Mark told the boy's father that his son was committing illegal activities on using their Comcast service, and was going to suspend their service for a week. Mark later posted his account of what happened:
the father began to yell at his son, i then heard a loud smack, and then sobbing, and then cracking noise as if something was breaking..it then occured to me that the father had just beat the s*** out of his kid, and the cracking noise was the sound of a hammer on an xbox.
Amazingly, there is no mention of him reporting any of this to the authorities. The icing on the cake is that all this gloating inadvertently gave Comcast enough information to figure out who "Sir Lagzalot" really was. Citing inappropriate use of company tools, Mark employment was terminated.
It's hard not to side with Mark in this case. I know I personally have fallen victim to griefers and general asshats playing online. To quote Star WarsSpiderman; "With great power comes great responsibility". Simply because he could doesn't mean he should and it cost him his job and a child was accosted by his father.
(Deleted) To Those of YOU who packet flood...be aware [halo3forums]
Outsourced Comcast Tech Gets Vengeance On Xbox Cheaters - But in the process abuses Comcast support systems, violating user privacy... [DSLReports]
[via The Consumerist]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 2 April 2008
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: child abuse, comcast, ddos, poor judgement, vengence, vigilante justice
Sad on both accounts. Though if Mark would have kept quite, no one would have likely found out. Still wrong on his, the kid's and the father's part for the hacking, jamming, and smacking respectively.
And I thought "With great power comes great responsibility" came from Spider Man.
Yea that line is from Spiderman. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stan_Lee
Frankly it sounds like 3 winners all collided on a path of fate. I really hate child abuse, but well... I can't feel sorry for someone who would DOS folks who are kicking their ass in a game.
This Comcast guy comes off as a douche too, so I'm glad he lost his l33t job.
I don't like anyone involved in this story. As stated, everyone was handling the situation poorly. I guess it would be a complete picture if the father was arrested for child abuse or something...
Haha, so it did. So corrected. My nerdy quotes are getting crossed.
Really? I find it completely easy to not side with him. This guy is a complete asshole for abusing his company's tools this way and I'm incredibly glad that Comcast fired his ass.
Honestly, does Comcast even train their staff in ethics? Or is this because this tool was an outsourced employee?
I used to work for Comcast, and actually everyone has access to SVP (those pics bring back terrible memories!) But yah, if you do something shady it usually doesn't take long to be fired.
Convergy isn't happy with the Canadian dollar being high lately so soon it'll all be outsourced Indian people with that info instead, hurray!
I think this might actually be a great reason why data collection should be limited to an absolute minimum - not like atm, where everyone imitates the damn USA Patriot Act and tries to retain as much data as possible to hunt down "terrorists" (aka "critical human beings"). Whenever people (and governments) have access to sensitive information, they are going to abuse it sooner or later. And as long as we can't control it, we should at least demand that there not be any more information about us available than is absolutely necessary.
Also, yeah, Mark's an asshat. Should've gone through the proper authorities and the impact would have been all the greater.