spread a smear to thousands of viewers. Even if it is not targeted, it
can still do a lot of damage.
E-Mobbing
If one person can create a devastating personal attack, a crowd can do
much more. Creative attackers have found many ways to encourage
a crowd to do the attacker’s dirty work. Attackers have motivated
crowds by using social norms, politics, and appeals to the crowd’s
sense of mob justice. All too often, the crowd rushes to judgment, re-
gardless of the actual innocence or guilt of the condemned party. As
explained by one expert, “Collectives tend to be mean, to designate
official enemies, to be violent, and to discourage creative, rigorous
thought. . . . We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the
lure of the mob.”
24
The result is often an e-mob or e-lynching. Because Google and
many other search engines effectively view links as “votes” on the
truthfulness or importance of a statement, a crowd that has rushed
to judgment may cause vast reputation damage when its smears be-
come self-sustaining.
By provoking a group’s sense of right and wrong, an attacker can
encourage the mob to smear or harass a victim. Attacks of this sort
invoke the proverbial online justice squad (sometimes better known as
the electronic lynch mob) by spreading an allegation that the victim
has gotten away with some particularly offensive act. The commu-
nity’s moral outrage is kindled by the allegation that the victim will
escape without punishment, especially if there are issues of privilege
or class. This emotion can often overcome normal social restraint
and the common desire to stay out of controversies. By manipulating
these emotions, a careful attacker can turn a peaceful community
into a bloodthirsty mob that seeks to punish the victim for his al-
leged transgression.
If the allegation is sufficiently offensive and the crowd sufficiently
receptive, the crowd will take over the attacker’s dirty work by
spreading the allegations further or prying into the victim’s privacy.
Wild West 2.0138
The speed of the crowd’s response can be amazing: within days, an
allegation on one website can be copied and spread to hundreds of
other sites, where it can be viewed by hundreds of thousands of oth-
ers. The wider the allegation is distributed, the faster it spreads.
Meanwhile, the original attacker can sit back and watch the show
without ever having to get his hands dirty.
Often, these mobs start within a small community away from the
victim. Juvenile discussion sites like “4chan” or politically active sites
like Reddit.com launch many attacks. These sites permit or encour-
age attacks on outsiders and may quickly become an echo chamber as
users reinforce each others’ sense of outrage. Without outside mem-
bers to invoke reason or encourage peaceful conflict resolution, the
outrage builds until community members begin to take destructive
actions toward the victim.
These types of electronic mobs are not unique to the Western
world. China recently experienced its own misdirected justice mob.
In 2008, a rich woman in a gray car slapped an old woman on foot,
allegedly for daring to ask why the driver was setting up what ap-
peared to be a false humanitarian relief tent. A small protest imme-
diately occurred and the gray car was overturned. The appearance of
haughtiness by a rich woman fanned moral outrage in thousands of
Chinese citizens. One bystander took a photo of the car’s license
plate, which read “Sichuan B D37332.” The photo was posted online,
and somebody else provided the alleged registration information for
the owner of the car. The car was registered to one Fan Xiaohua, and
the posting contained the alleged phone number and home address
of the offender. But the phone number posted was that of a different
Fan Xiaohua who lived in a different city. By the time somebody
posted a correction, it was already too late. The wrong information
had spread far and wide, leading to widespread harassment of the
wrong Fan Xiaohua and vast smearing of her reputation. The mis-
takenly blamed Fan said, “Nowadays, I don’t dare answer the mobile
phone because it could be someone calling up to curse me out.”
25
One
editorial condemned the practice: “Internet violence usually begins as
Types of Internet Attacks 13 9
moral condemnation. So some netizens conferred the right to use vi-
olence upon themselves out of a sense of serving justice. . . . When
the netizens get together to use violence, they also go in under the
twin covers of group anonymity and personal anonymity.”
26
Viral Content
An attacker does not have to tap into a community’s sense of justice
or outrage to spread an attack. Some forms of attack are self-
perpetuating because of their humor or whimsy. This so-called viral
content is often quickly copied around the Internet. Much like a nu-
clear chain reaction, each iteration makes the content available to
other users who themselves copy, download, or e-mail it to yet oth-
ers. Viral content can quickly be replicated across the Internet and
end up copied across completely unrelated sites.
A benign example of viral content is the now-passé “FAIL”
meme. The meme involves photos that contain some obvious error or
inconsistency—such as a news report with the words “horse killed”
written over a photo of a deer
27
or a security camera pointed directly
at a wall
28
—tagged with the word “FAIL” in large block letters. The
humor is obvious: somebody forgot to think before doing his job.
These isolated nuggets of content are easily understood and easily
copied from one website to another.
But some viral content is malicious, and even nonmalicious viral
content can harm the reputation of the people depicted. One “FAIL”
image purports to show a fake driver’s license confiscated by the po-
lice; the image is funny because the license has a photo of a couple
rather than of one person. Unfortunately, the image leaves the name,
address, birth date, and driver’s license number fully legible. If any of
that information is real (or belongs to somebody else), then the holder
of the license is vulnerable to harassment and reputation attacks.
29
Another well-distributed “FAIL” image shows a contestant on the
once-popular game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” In the im-
age, it appears that the contestant has answered the question “Which
is larger?” by stating that an elephant is larger than the moon. Of
Wild West 2.0140
course, the photo has been manipulated: in the original, the contest-
ant correctly answered a question about the everyday name for the
trachea with the word “windpipe.”
30
The entire question and answer in
the manipulated image are fake. Nonetheless, the victim looks like an
idiot in the photo, and most viewers never bother to check the facts.
Other forms of manipulated photos are equally effective as viral
smears so long as they are self-contained and easy to replicate. One
recent viral smear involved politics and the 2008 election. An image
circulated on the Internet, purporting to be from a political debate
on the Fox News Channel. A caption showed the heading
“Obama/Biden–Osama Bin Laden—Coincidence?” This image trig-
gered a sense of outrage that a news organization would publish such
smears, and it was quickly spread around the Internet as evidence of
bias in media coverage of the 2008 election. Of course, the image was
again a forgery: the original caption broadcast by Fox simply identi-
fied the speaker as “Dan Griswold–Cato Institute,” with no mention
of “Obama” or “Osama.” Instead, an unknown prankster had simply
added the offensive caption himself.
31
The reputations of commen-
tator Dan Griswold and the news network both suffered.
Pay to Play
A dedicated attacker—whether motivated by business or by personal
reasons—can leverage the power of money to promote a smear. Most
online advertising programs are designed for use by profit-making
businesses that wish to advertise products and services. But many
programs allow anybody to place an advertisement. The democrati-
zation of advertising has been a boon for owners of small- and
medium-size businesses, who can now reach hundreds of thousands
of potential customers. But it also allows others to spread attacks and
smears through paid online advertising.
Contextual search advertising is one of the most powerful ways
to quickly advance an online reputation attack. If you have used
Google to search the Internet, you have most likely seen contextual
search advertising: the advertisements that appear at the top of a
Types of Internet Attacks 14 1
Google search and on the right side of the page that are context-
specific ads related to the search you performed. Anyone can place a
text advertisement nearly instantaneously, usually for just pennies per
click. By placing an advertisement, an attacker can reach every person
who searches for information about the victim or the victim’s busi-
ness. Those curious enough to click are directed to the attacker’s site,
and even those that don’t click still see the text of the advertisement.
There are some restrictions on the sites that can be promoted—
for example, the Google AdWords program refuses to run adver-
tisements against “protected groups” singled out on the basis of race,
religion, and similar characteristics. Nor can the text of ads them-
selves “include accusations or attacks relating to an individual’s per-
sonal life.”
32
But those restrictions have been evaded by ads that
instruct viewers to click to “learn the truth about” an individual on an
attack website; just like “captain sober today” creates a distinct im-
plication, so too does “learn the whole truth about John Doe.” If you
have been the victim of an attack that is promoted through Ad-
Words, you should immediately contact Google and attempt to get
the advertisements removed.
Some other online advertising programs are less careful than
Google AdWords about the content of the advertisements they ac-
cept. The BlogAds network runs advertisements across many popu-
lar social and political-commentary websites. But the network has
been accused of not enforcing quality standards and of creating a
“race to the bottom” by allowing individual sites to determine
whether to accept an offensive advertisement. An unscrupulous at-
tacker can easily find a sufficiently unscrupulous site to host his attack
advertisement.
Hybrid Attacks: False Flags and Trolling
There are a few unique attack types that combine an attack and a dis-
tribution method. These usually rely on trickery of some kind and al-
most always rely on the anonymity of the Internet.
Wild West 2.0142
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