An American hacker has been despatched to prison for carrying out a sequence of cyber and swatting attacks, together with sending bogus threats of shootings and bombings to educational institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States.
North Carolina resident Timothy Dalton Vaughn also referred to as in a fake report of an plane hijacking involving a jetliner traveling from London to San Francisco.
Protect and backup your data using AOMEI Backupper. AOMEI Backupper takes secure and encrypted backups from your Windows, hard drives or partitions. With AOMEI Backupper you will never be worried about loosing your data anymore.
Get AOMEI Backupper with 72% discount from an authorized distrinutor of AOMEI: SerialCart® (Limited Offer).
➤ Activate Your Coupon Code
The 22-year-previous, recognized on line by the handles “WantedbyFeds” and “Hacker_R_US,” was arrested in February 2019 by specific agents with the FBI.
Authorities identified that Vaughn experienced in his possession 200 sexually specific photos and films depicting youngsters, which includes at the very least one toddler.
Vaughn was a member of a worldwide collective of computer hackers and swatters who call themselves the “Apophis Squad.”
The squad prompted disruptions by producing threatening phone phone calls, sending false stories of violent university attacks by means of email, and launching dispersed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on web-sites.
“Vaughn and some others despatched e-mails to at minimum 86 college districts threatening armed learners and explosives,” claimed the Department of Justice.
“The threatened attacks provided the imminent detonation of a bomb built with ammonium nitrate and gasoline oil, rocket-propelled grenade heads put under faculty buses, and the placement of land mines on sports activities fields.”
Squad members in some cases documented threats applying “spoofed” email addresses to make it look as though the stories experienced been sent by harmless get-togethers, together with the mayor of London.
Among the squad’s victims was a Extended Beach front motorsport company whose web-site hoonigan.com was knocked offline for a few days by a DDoS attack. The small business obtained an email demanding a ransom of 1.5 Bitcoin (well worth somewhere around $20,000) to cease the attack.
The Apophis Squad also hacked and defaced the web-site of a college in Colombia so that web site website visitors had been greeted with the impression of Adolf Hitler clutching a signal that examine “YOU ARE HACKED.”
In November 2019, Vaughn pleaded guilty to one depend of conspiracy to convey threats to injure, express bogus data regarding use of explosive product, and intentionally damage a computer system one particular count of pc hacking and a single depend of possession of boy or girl sexual abuse materials.
Yesterday, Judge Otis Wright sentenced Vaughn to jail terms of 95 months for the kid sexual abuse product possession cost and 60 months for each of the other costs. The phrases are to be served concurrently.
Some components of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com