Taking a pause from the WSS movie plans – indefinitely. I had heard there may be someone from a much, much, much bigger outfit than my blog potentially covering this as I bumped into a mutual party during my research, and after the last 48 hours I had with this, am very much interested in letting someone else take this mantle who actually has a circulation of millions of papers and means for proper security. I approached this as a disinterested 3rd party trying to tell a story with honesty and integrity, and well, I don’t want to be involved. A friend of mine told me once something like, “it’s like documenting cartel wars – just bad things are going to happen” – when referring to covering difficult stories. I am paraphrasing, of course, but the idea is – I’m out. I have covered many stories here, but haven’t had to contact people to verify things. That’s where this took a wrong turn quickly.

The bigger idea was this – write a book on the silver squeeze movement. Make no mistake, a lot of the players involved with this were instrumental in this movement. With the recent happenings, I wanted to write a 5-7 part series about the story behind the story with the rise and fall of the WallStreet Silver movement – or at least what has become of it. This could potentially be picked up for wider publication, and with this, I perhaps get some funding for the bigger book as a side project. When silver hits $75, voila – I have a book ready for press telling the big story. This particular saga was going to be a chapter or so. However, while the book may someday be in play for the entire movement – I’m pretty much skipping the part with the current fiasco to complete a series to get picked up. I’ll just self publish the book and touch on the current issue from 150,000 ft. This is a train wreck I want no part of.

I predicted this is going to get much bigger over the next week, but…..dayum. Consider me a character in the movie that is in for 38 seconds. At 2:45 of this clip is about where I’m at in the movie. P.S. one of my favorite movies!

There’s a lot of things going on there on both sides I don’t particularly want to get involved in, nor do I plan on writing about it here anymore. I feel like I got too close to the sun. I had a few other parts penned – but I needed to do due diligence on facts so no party was unnecessarily harmed. When accusations are made, I just cannot publish the accusations. I needed to try and understand the source evidence of the accusations prior to publishing and do due diligence on accusations. You know, ethics. Try to be fair, honest, and above board. I stepped into mine field of shit at precisely the wrong time. That’s all the details I plan to release on the mine field. All of the people involved, I wish you all well.

So that’s about a wrap.

During the course of this investigation, I had uncovered death threats against people, which is an avenue I can talk about that was a tangent of this I felt is meaningful. One was verified with screen shots – but the attribution of WHO it was happened to be a mystery. It was a reddit screen name, and with that, unless you work for reddit – good luck. The other was a phone call I’ll discuss in a bit.

I’m going to not release identities or details, but more or less focus on how incidents are treated and what you can do about it.

Reddit

I sent an email to lawenforcement@reddit.com and legal@reddit.com because I wanted to understand their policies on what happens when death threats are made. This then got me wondering how I would respond to such things. I haven’t ever dealt with this, so I just assumed you called the police, to an extent. However, the cyber security background in me also realizes that there may not be a lot that local police can do. With children today – how are they supposed to react? What methods do they have to protect themselves?

With respect to reddit, I’m barely there. A few years ago, I did some DD for WallStreet Silver before any real craziness happened. But if you spend enough time on there, you can see a lot of things that are kinda disappointing to the ordinary person. You start seeing a lot of trolls and perhaps psychotic behavior. I liked writing DD there, but tend to not get involved with the chat rooms for the above reasons. I have a lot of hobbies, and Reddit fights aren’t in my top 3,000 things to do.

These communities have moderators, and with this, they are supposed to be the ones to be responsible for the rules and content. But what happens if community rules are violated? Report to moderators, and perhaps someone is put in timeout or banned.

But what happens when you deal with people who don’t play by normal people rules? It’s hard to describe when you run into mentally unbalanced people, but you know it when you see it. These people – may not be great with the real world, and their lives are their digital identities. Their handles. Usernames.

What happens if that is threatened? What happens if things escalate?

On Reddit, an acquaintance of mine had her life threatened. This screen shot was making the rounds, so I wanted to ask her what’s being done about it. She told me something like this happened before and the police didn’t do anything. I was kind of stunned. Also, with this case, she made a report with Reddit but after 3 days no one had gotten back to her. This is what made me want to reach out to Reddit – as I figured they had some sort of canned process they use. She made a comment something about the second amendment, and well, it makes a ton of sense in her case.

Phone call death threats?

Another acquaintance of mine told me he had his life threatened over the phone. The problem was, it was an anonymous number and while he felt he could identify the voice, no recordings existed. I don’t believe the police were called in this case, as I had to get off the phone with him and I forgot to press him on this. In cases like this, it’s particularly difficult because someone called your number from a blocked number. They can use voice modification devices, and they can harass you.

What can you do?

Cyber bullying

Another problem perhaps every parent faces today is with their kids and online. It’s terrifying to think your child has this world at school you know nothing about, then perhaps they get home and have to deal with these bullies then outside of school in chat rooms and the like. Social media is perhaps a cancer to have kids involved with, but to deny kids things like TikTok today – you’d be perhaps throwing them in the stone age of their friends.

What can you do?

Abstain – in the case of Reddit and the movie business, I choose to not participate in this line of particular engagement. For the most part, keeping a low profile online is probably a good idea. Additionally, perhaps have a professional footprint and a social footprint, and never shall the two meet. Perhaps your school age kids don’t get to be “online” or at least have it heavily moderated.

Records – if you or someone you know is a part of any of the above, you need to record all of the details possible. Start with the 5 horsemen we used to call in security report writing. Who, What, Where, When, How, and sometimes Why? The why can help with clues, but the first 5 details are extremely important to proceeding. Do you know who contacted you? Screen name, phone number, email address. What did they say or do to you, specifically? Where did this take place? At your home, in a library, etc? When did it happen, precisely? Documenting the exact time might then help with looking through logs and understanding the threat. How did the threat happen? Email, phone, chat room, app? Why? This can be important – did you say something mean to someone and it’s possible retaliation? Perhaps you fired someone yesterday, it can go to motive or identifying a suspect pool

Attribution – while it is true that some people can remain anonymous online, it takes a level of skill to do so. And, depending on the level of crime committed depends on the resources and tools used to attribute to an individual. You see things like, “the pentagon is attacked millions of times per day”. The truth is, it’s a lot of scanning with tools to find vulnerabilities. And, often these can be zombie machines where the operators are in another country. But most people don’t understand that for specific threats, on specific systems, they WILL find you. Now, if you are in another country, you might delay them finding you a bit, but they can still find you. Some countries have treaties with the US, where a request can be made to them as if they were on Main St USA and discovering the source isn’t terribly difficult. VPNs and onion types of networks can potentially be problematic for attribution – but again – we need to look at the level of the attack.

With this, admins may look at logs on machines to trace cyber events – but when it comes to threats, you start back tracing IPs and MAC addresses to source. All communications go over hops, and are routed. Think of it like the post office. You drop your message in the mail with a return address on it. It goes to your local post office, then a bigger post office, then it flies across the country to a regional office, then a local office, and delivered to your friend. The message has the return address on it. The same is sort of true with packets with messages in computers. But with the mail system, perhaps that user/mail no longer exists. That mail has the return address on it so they know the source.

Many crafty people want to use VPNs and the like. Many don’t realize they usually have to give away cryptographic algos in order to operate. Meaning, most things are hidden except when it might come to a national security type of thing. Imagine you are in a city and put a message in a mailbox with a blurred out return address and you mail it from a drop box and not your home. You think you are invisible. For most, you are. But imagine you are in that city and they have cameras everywhere. They watch you drop the mail in the box, they have facial recognition, the message is tagged, and they can follow you from your home in replay to you getting to the mailbox using a backwards means of tracking the message.

What this means is that if you are a kid in school sending a mean email to someone, you probably have people telling you to delete the email. If this is a message to an airport with a bomb threat, you will probably be found. The issue is many people just feel invincible, and they are rolling the dice on who is on the other end of the keyboard.

Reporting

Obviously, it makes sense to report a crime. But to who? I would start with your local police department. While they may tell you they cannot help you, they may have resources to where you can go. Perhaps state police or even FBI. I’m not saying reporting this stuff is easy, but try and remember the 5 horsemen to record any details immediately. This can help investigators at all level help you more with your case.

Conclusion

I’m going to do more of a deep dive on this. It’s been 11 years since I had this stuff in grad school, and laws are changing all the time. I want to know what Reddit says about this kind of behavior, and what their process is. For all I know, they consult with law enforcement on every case.

This process has opened my eyes a little to a lot of the cyber wars going on that no one is really tracking. If you look too closely, you might get burned – but the awareness I have here on how some people are powerless also allows some people to feel like they can roam unchecked. This might be a new cause I have.