{"id":14031,"date":"2018-12-07T19:17:03","date_gmt":"2018-12-08T03:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/12\/07\/news-7798\/"},"modified":"2018-12-07T19:17:03","modified_gmt":"2018-12-08T03:17:03","slug":"news-7798","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/12\/07\/news-7798\/","title":{"rendered":"Bomb Threat Hoaxer, DDos Boss Gets 3 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2018 01:38:49 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ringleader of a gang of cyber hooligans that made bomb threats against hundreds of schools and launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Web sites — including KrebsOnSecurity on multiple occasions — has been sentenced to three years in a U.K. prison, and faces the possibility of additional charges from U.S.-based law enforcement officials.<\/p>\n

George Duke-Cohan<\/strong>, 19, caused a massive uproar earlier this year after communicating a series of bomb threats against 1,700 schools, colleges and universities across the United Kingdom. But shortly after being arrested on suspicion of the threats and released, Duke-Cohan was back at it again — this time expanding his threats to include schools in the United States.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

One of many tweets from the attention-starved Apophis Squad, which launched multiple DDoS attacks against KrebsOnsecurity over the past few months.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

At the same time, authorities in the U.K. and U.S. discovered that Duke-Cohan was responsible for falsely reporting the hijack of a plane bound for the United States. That flight, which had almost 300 passengers on board, was later quarantined in San Francisco pending a full security check.<\/p>\n

Duke-Cohan was part of an attention-seeking group of ne’er-do-wells who called themselves the Apophis Squad<\/strong>. Duke-Cohan and his crew modeled themselves after the actions of the Lizard Squad<\/a>,\u00a0another group of e-fame seeking online hoodlums who also ran a DDoS-for-hire service, called in bomb threats to airlines, DDoSed this Web site repeatedly and whose members were nearly all subsequently arrested and charged with various cybercrimes.<\/p>\n

Indeed, until recently the Apophis Squad\u2019s Web site and DDoS-for-hire service was hosted on the same Internet server used by a handful of other domains that were tied to the Lizard Squad.<\/span><\/p>\n

Earlier this year, KrebsOnSecurity.com came under sustained attack from the Apophis Squad, who took to Twitter to taunt this author while the attacks were underway. Duke-Cohan and other Apophis Squad members also attacked the free email service Protonmail<\/strong>, even as all of them continued to use their Protonmail accounts to communicate about the attacks.<\/p>\n

KrebsOnSecurity assisted Protonmail in its investigation into the attacks, and the company later credited this author<\/a> with helping to identify Duke-Cohan as the driving force behind the DDoS attacks.<\/p>\n

Sources close to the investigation say Duke-Cohan may yet see additional charges from U.S.-based authorities. Also, several other members identified by this author as alleged co-conspirators along with Duke-Cohan have not yet been charged with a crime either in the U.K. or in the United States.<\/p>\n

It’s not always fun when your site isn’t responsive because of determined attacks from groups like the Apophis Squad, but I try not to get too bent out of shape when these attacks do occur — mainly for two reasons: Firstly, those responsible typically end up getting busted and going to jail. Also, I usually get at least one good story out of it. In this case, make that two good stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Further reading:<\/p>\n

Schools Bomb Hoaxes: Teenager Jailed for Nationwide Threats<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/krebsonsecurity.com\/feed\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2018 01:38:49 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

The alleged ringleader of a gang of cyber hooligans that made bomb threats against hundreds of schools and launched debilitating denial-of-service attacks against Web sites (including KrebsOnSecurity on multiple occasions) has been sentenced to three years in a U.K. prison, and faces the possibility of additional charges from U.S.-based law enforcement officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10643,10642],"tags":[16740,20380,10712,19423,16696,13761],"class_list":["post-14031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-independent","category-krebs","tag-a-little-sunshine","tag-apophis-squad","tag-ddos-for-hire","tag-george-duke-cohan","tag-neer-do-well-news","tag-protonmail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}