Second Life, Olivia Newton John and Attempted Kidnapping

The Denial of Service attack is an attack on a computer resource to render it unavailable to its intended users. Very often it is the work of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Recently ReputationDefender came across a news story where a man denied service to a would-be lover and was attacked, kind of a variation on the DoS attack.

It’s your typical boy-meets-girl-over-the-Internet-posing-as-a-woman-in-Second Life story, but with some zaniness thrown in for good measure. After meeting in first life (that is, real life), the 52-year-old male victim from Claymont, Delaware ended the relationship (virtual and otherwise). This apparently upset the real woman of the pair, but instead of resorting to the typical jaded Internet-lover tactics of weepy/angry blog posts and troll forum comments calling his manhood into question, she decided to get physical, and not in the Linda Ronstadt Olivia Newton John kind of way [Thanks Old Fox!].

image via laughing squid.

In August the jilted woman allegedly drove to the victim’s workplace in Pennsylvania and attempted to kidnap him at gunpoint. When that initial attempt at reconciliation failed (we can’t understand why not), she returned undaunted two weeks later to track down the victim’s Delaware home address. Unfortunately for her, he had recently moved, so she did what any sane person would do: she posed as a postal worker and searched for four days until she found the new address.

A truly compassionate soul, the woman brought her dog Gogi along with her to Delaware and then cut and removed a screened window in order to enter her virtual ex’s apartment.

According to police, when our would-be beau arrived home on Thursday, August 21, he saw someone pointing an object at his chest that was projecting a laser beam. Recognizing that his apartment was not the location for an impromptu rave, he fled immediately and contacted the police.

Authorities soon arrived on the scene, only to discover that the dog Gogi had been bound with duct tape and put in the bathroom while the woman was nowhere to be found. In addition to the dog, she apparently left behind a pair of handcuffs, a roll of duct tape, a Taser and a BB gun.

Maryland authorities identified her vehicle approximately an hour after the incident at a rest stop on I-95. After a brief struggle she was taken into custody and now faces charges of attempted kidnapping, burglary and aggravated menacing.

The conclusion is one that we’ve brought up before, but it bears repeating: be careful with what you do on the Internet. It is a very short leap for a determined individual to go from cyber stalking to real world stalking. Both are very hurtful, scary and illegal, but at least you can’t get tased over email.