Comment by throwaway09223

I have a related story:

Around the year 2000 I was working operations in the NOC for WebTV (then owned by Microsoft). For those who don't know, WebTV was a little set-top box with a modem which would dial up on demand and provide a very basic web/chat/email experience on the TV. The box would call a 1800 number to figure out its own phone number, then re-dial on a local toll-free number with a local sub-contracted ISP.

One of the services we had would periodically send a UDP datagram out to online clients to let them know they had new email. The settop box would then light up a little indicator light.

Of course, sometimes the client would hang up. The IP might get allocated to a PC dialup user. And sometimes, that PC dialup user might be running a firewall that was popular back then, called BLACK ICE DEFENDER.

BLACK ICE DEFENDER had all these (not so) cool features, the kind that semi-technical people love. For example, it would log ATTACKS. What are ATTACKS? Unrecognized traffic, of course.

Sometimes the little UDP datagram for our "you have mail" service would be delivered to a PC user running BLACK ICE DEFENDER, which would register it as an ATTACK. It would then ever so helpfully look up the ARIN contact information to see who sent the errant datagram -- which had the NOC phone number. It would then tell the user "THIS ENTITY IS HACKING YOU" and imply that contacting them would be productive. Yes, you could pick up a phone and call the Microsoft NOC. Back then, the internet was a smaller place.

My job was to check the NOC voicemail, which was reliably filled with very angry people. Often they would threaten that they've reported us to the FBI or somesuch, or that it confirmed some conspiracy theory or another. We played the good ones on speakerphone for entertainment.

Good times. Doesn't happen anymore.