Two Attacks: One Local, One Worldwide

I saw the headline on Yahoo! -- shooting in gym kills at least 3, injuring others. It didn't mention the city, and I assumed it happened somewhere else. Then I saw my friend Lori posted on Facebook: "Just wanted to let everyone know I'm okay. I'm a member of LA Fitness, but I wasn't there this morning," and I realized that the shooting happened here in Pittsburgh.

According to reports, George Sodini entered the Collier Township gym and sprayed bullets into a group of women gathered for an early morning exercise class. Then, after killing 3 and injuring 10 more, he turned the gun on himself.

Acquaintances and co-workers recall Sodini seeming like a normal enough guy. Sodini, 48, worked at K&L Gates, doing IT work for the prestigious law firm for the last ten years. He owned a small, tidy home in Scott Township, where his neighbors describe him as friendly, although not overly so.

But it seems Sodini had lots of secrets, which he shared online. Like Richard Pawlawsky, the individual who killed three police officers this spring in Stanton Heights, Sodini also chronicled his ramblings via an online diary. It's full of racial and political epithets, hatred directed at his family, his friends, and his employer.

Fueled by self-proclaimed loneliness, lack of happiness in his life, and his perceived rejection by women over more than a decade juxtaposed against the "young girls here [who] look so beautiful" at 24 Hour Fitness, he begins a plan: arming himself and killing. Read his online diary and you'll find evidence that within his "normal" exterior laid a very troubled man.

While Sodini took great lengths to leave some sort of legacy through his diary (where he urges "copy this to netgroups, where my voice will speak forever"), another individual halfway around the world from Pittsburgh was equally intent on removing the voice of another.

Yesterday, social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and the site that hosts this blog, Blogger, were all hacked into. Facebook, LiveJournal, and Blogger (for the most part) stayed online, but Twitter's site completely went dark.

Ordinarily my response would be so what, these sites are fairly frivolous and the worst that could happen is that you have to wait a few hours to take yet another inane Facebook quiz. However, according to published reports, the attack was carefully planned and orchestrated and had only one target: an individual going by the user name Cyxymu.

So what's so special about this guy Cyxymu? Cyxymu is reportedly from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and has been making some statements that made some people angry. So angry, in fact, that they decided to silence Cyxymu by bringing down these web sites. The fact that not only Cyxymu, but the other millions of users also went offline, was apparently just collateral damage.

Internet experts have tracked the hackers location to Abkhazia, a territory along the eastern coast of the Black Sea that's in dispute between Russia and the Republic of Georgia. The presumed thinking was, shut down the websites, and it will shut up the person.

Many of you know that in 2003, I started a nonprofit that brought together volunteers with charities that needed help. Pretty innocuous, right? As it turned out, another charity didn't like what we were doing and threatened us with a lawsuit. When we didn't back down, four weeks later our web site was hacked into and destroyed. Coincidence? I never thought so. The FBI were called in and traced the hackers to overseas, where their jurisdiction ended, and the case was closed.

It was bad enough that this happened, but the hackers hacked into the server and not only destroyed our site, but the 50-60 other sites on the server, not unlike these hackers that brought down an entire site in an attempt to silence one person.

No one wins when a hacking like this takes place. And as these hackers will discover, it won't shut down a single person or a single organization. A few weeks later, my web site was back online, intact and just as strong as ever. I suspect the same will happen to Cyxymu.