There has been a recent spate of SWATings in the United States and Canada, with gamers and game developers having police sent to their homes and places of work as a mean prank. Their only crime was speaking out against online harassment, or even more innocuously, streaming Minecraft or Counter-Strike on Twitch.
In case you're unfamiliar with the term SWATing, it's what happens when someone malicious sends a SWAT team, or to a lesser extent, uniformed police officers to your home. The "prank", which is becoming more and more common, has resulted in the deaths of family pets and terrorized families.
SWATing and DDOSing (denial of service attacks that cripple your network speed) is usually made possible by the fact that voice communications apps like Skype make their users vulnerable to having their IPs disclosed by any number of web applications that sniff out those details.
One company, Curse Gaming, means to protect users from these attacks by introducing a new VOIP app called CurseVoice. There's an interview up on Polygon with the company's CTO Michael Comperda, who addresses how he hopes the app will help to protect users from DDOS and SWATing attacks.
Like Skype, it's completely free (it's supported by ads). You can grab it here. It supports group chats, in-game overlay, an invite system, and voice-matching for players who are logged into the same game to quickly start a chat session–features I wish other applications had.
