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Though I'm sure the sentence won't be that long.
This is a similar but slightly different flavor than SWATting, this guy took online orders to call in bomb threats to schools for jokes or to get people out of tests for a day. This particular guy, Timothy Dalton Vaughn (heck of a name!) of South Carolina was part of a gang called Apophis Squad that has largely been dismantled, they also trafficked in Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where they take armies of compromised servers or compromised internet-connected devices and use them to flood targets with connection requests, the targets can't handle tens or hundreds of millions of requests per second and collapse under the load.
Of course, if you pay a fee, the flood will cease.
Vaughn had good operational security and maintained multiple online personas for his nefarious deeds. Two mistakes led to his getting caught. First, when he attacked ProtonMail, he used their VPN to attack them! This narrowed the suspect pool considerably. Second, he registered for an online game using one of his criminal aliases. This, in and of itself, was no big deal - but then that gaming site was hacked and its user database leaked to the internet. Apparently law enforcement or people interested in such got ahold of it, found his information, and it was traced back to him. Subsequent investigation and cross-checks identified Vaughn and he now sports shiny stainless steel bracelets.
From the Krebs article: "The Justice Department indictment against Vaughn ... released this week alleges the pair were equally responsible for sending spoofed bomb threat emails to 2,000 schools in the United States and more than 400 in the U.K., falsely warning that various explosive devices were planted at the schools and would be detonated unless a ransom demand was paid."
Vaughnie! Chu have some spalinin' to do! And you'll have lots of time in a Federal prison to do it in! I wonder if the Brits will have a standing order waiting for his extradition as soon as the Feds release him from prison.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/02/bomb-threat-hoaxer-exposed-by-hacked-gaming-site/
This is a similar but slightly different flavor than SWATting, this guy took online orders to call in bomb threats to schools for jokes or to get people out of tests for a day. This particular guy, Timothy Dalton Vaughn (heck of a name!) of South Carolina was part of a gang called Apophis Squad that has largely been dismantled, they also trafficked in Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where they take armies of compromised servers or compromised internet-connected devices and use them to flood targets with connection requests, the targets can't handle tens or hundreds of millions of requests per second and collapse under the load.
Of course, if you pay a fee, the flood will cease.
Vaughn had good operational security and maintained multiple online personas for his nefarious deeds. Two mistakes led to his getting caught. First, when he attacked ProtonMail, he used their VPN to attack them! This narrowed the suspect pool considerably. Second, he registered for an online game using one of his criminal aliases. This, in and of itself, was no big deal - but then that gaming site was hacked and its user database leaked to the internet. Apparently law enforcement or people interested in such got ahold of it, found his information, and it was traced back to him. Subsequent investigation and cross-checks identified Vaughn and he now sports shiny stainless steel bracelets.
From the Krebs article: "The Justice Department indictment against Vaughn ... released this week alleges the pair were equally responsible for sending spoofed bomb threat emails to 2,000 schools in the United States and more than 400 in the U.K., falsely warning that various explosive devices were planted at the schools and would be detonated unless a ransom demand was paid."
Vaughnie! Chu have some spalinin' to do! And you'll have lots of time in a Federal prison to do it in! I wonder if the Brits will have a standing order waiting for his extradition as soon as the Feds release him from prison.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/02/bomb-threat-hoaxer-exposed-by-hacked-gaming-site/
