by Constantine von Hoffman

Boston Cops Show Hackers You Can Beat Them by Laughing at Them

Opinion
Feb 13, 20122 mins
CybercrimeSecurity

Maybe humor will let the public know how trivial most of the attacks on law enforcement sites are.

A lot of media noise is being generated around attacks by Anonymous and other hackers on various law enforcement sites – even though they haven’t really amounted to much. The groups have hacked sites for the CIA, the Wisconsin and West Virginia Chiefs of Police Association, the Newark New Jersey Police Foundation and the police departments for Salt Lake City and Boston.

In Boston, visitors to BPDNews.com saw a video of rapper KRS-One performing his song, “Sound of Da Police,” not the usual police and crime news. So the cops decided to return fire in an appropriate way – by laughing at the hackers for the idiocy of their efforts and targets via YouTube. While the video isn’t comic gold by most standards for a bunch of cops this is “Bridesmaids” revisited.

In between moments of official PR department blather is one officer saying, “My reaction was, ‘Why would anybody want to destroy a perfectly good KRS-One song?'” Another mentions being in a Dunkin’ Donuts shop and then adds, “Normally I sleep pretty well but since the site went down, I haven’t slept a wink.”

Hackers clearly do this to get attention and it works. Slow-witted media types (I speak from first hand knowledge) are happy to jump all over something like this. The result is civilian confusion and irritation among the people who know anything. Thank you XKCD for this great explanation:

XKCD