{"id":9531,"date":"2017-09-26T13:17:03","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T21:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/26\/news-3304\/"},"modified":"2017-09-26T13:17:03","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T21:17:03","slug":"news-3304","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/26\/news-3304\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian Man Gets 9 Months Detention for Serial Swattings, Bomb Threats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2017 15:49:39 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

A 19-year-old Canadian man was found guilty of making\u00a0almost three dozen fraudulent calls to emergency services across North America in 2013 and 2014. The false alarms, two of which targeted this author — involved phoning in phony bomb threats and multiple attempts at “swatting” — a dangerous hoax in which the perpetrator spoofs a call about a hostage situation or other violent crime in progress in the hopes of tricking police into responding at a particular address with deadly force.<\/p>\n

Curtis Gervais<\/strong> of Ottawa was 16 when he began his swatting spree, which prompted police departments across the United States and Canada to respond to fake bomb threats and active shooter reports at a number of schools and residences.<\/p>\n

Gervais, who taunted swatting targets using the Twitter accounts “ProbablyOnion” and “ProbablyOnion2,” got such a high off of his escapades that he hung out a for-hire shingle on Twitter, offering to swat anyone with the following tweet:<\/p>\n

\"wantswat\"<\/p>\n

Several Twitter users apparently<\/a> took<\/a> him<\/a> up<\/a> on<\/a> that<\/a> offer<\/a>. On March 9, 2014, @ProbablyOnion started sending me rude and annoying\u00a0messages on Twitter. A\u00a0month later (and several weeks after blocking him on Twitter), I received a phone call from the local police department. It was early in the morning on Apr. 10, and the cops wanted to know if everything was okay at our address.<\/p>\n

Since\u00a0this was\u00a0not the first time someone had called in a fake hostage situation at my home<\/a>, the call I received came from the police department\u2019s non-emergency number, and they were unsurprised when I told them that the Krebs manor and all of its inhabitants were just fine.<\/p>\n

Minutes after my local police department received that fake notification, @ProbablyOnion was bragging on Twitter about swatting me, including me on his public messages: \u201cYou have 5 hostages? And you will kill 1 hostage every 6 times and the police have 25 minutes to get you $100k in clear plastic.\u201d Another message read: \u201cGood morning! Just dispatched a swat team to your house, they didn\u2019t even call you this time, hahaha.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"po2-swatbk\"<\/p>\n

I told this user privately that targeting an investigative reporter maybe wasn\u2019t the brightest idea, and that he was likely to wind up in jail soon. \u00a0On May 7, @ProbablyOnion tried to get the swat team to visit my home again, and once again without success. \u201cHow\u2019s your door?\u201d he tweeted. I\u00a0replied<\/a>: \u201cDoor\u2019s fine, Curtis. But I\u2019m guessing yours won\u2019t be soon. Nice opsec!\u201d<\/p>\n

I was referring to\u00a0a document<\/a>\u00a0that had just been leaked on\u00a0Pastebin<\/strong>, which identified @ProbablyOnion as a 19-year-old\u00a0Curtis Gervais<\/strong>\u00a0from Ontario. @ProbablyOnion laughed it off but didn\u2019t deny the accuracy of the information, except to\u00a0tweet that the document got his age wrong<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A day later, @ProbablyOnion would\u00a0post his final\u00a0tweet<\/a>\u00a0before being arrested: \u201cStill awaiting for the horsies to bash down my door,\u201d a taunting reference to the\u00a0Royal Canadian Mounted Police<\/strong>\u00a0(RCMP).<\/p>\n

A Sept. 14, 2017 article<\/a> in the Ottawa Citizen<\/em> doesn’t name Gervais because it is against the law in Canada to name individuals charged with or convicted of crimes committed while they are a minor. But the story quite clearly refers to Gervais, who reportedly\u00a0is now married and expecting a child.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Citizen says the teenager was arrested by Ottawa police after the U.S. FBI traced his Internet address to his parents’ home. The story notes that “the hacker” and his family have maintained his innocence throughout the trial, and that they plan to appeal the verdict. Gervais’ attorneys reportedly claimed the youth was framed by the hacker collective Anonymous, but the judge in the case\u00a0was unconvinced.<\/p>\n

Apparently, Ontario Court Justice Mitch Hoffman<\/strong> handed down a lenient sentence\u00a0in part because of more than 900 hours of volunteer service the accused had performed in recent years. From the story:<\/p>\n

\n

Hoffman said that troublesome 16-year-old was hard to reconcile with the 19-year-old, recently married and soon-to-be father who stood in court before him, accompanied in court Thursday by his wife, father and mother.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has a bright future ahead of him if he uses his high level of computer skills and high intellect in a pro-social way,\u201d Hoffman said. \u201cIf he does not, he has a penitentiary cell waiting for him if he uses his skills to criminal ends.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

According to the article, the teen will serve six months of his nine-month sentence at a youth group home and three months at home “under strict restrictions, including the forfeiture of a home computer used to carry out the cyber pranks.” He also is barred from using Twitter or Skype during his 18-month probation period.<\/p>\n

Most people involved in swatting and making bomb threats are young males under the age of 18 \u2014 the age when kids seem to have little appreciation for or care about the seriousness of their actions. According to the FBI, each swatting incident costs emergency responders approximately $10,000. Each hoax also unnecessarily endangers the lives of the responders and the public.<\/p>\n

In February 2017, another 19-year-old — a man from Long Beach, Calif. named Eric “Cosmo the God” Taylor<\/strong> — was sentenced to three year’s probation<\/a> for his role in swatting my home in Northern Virginia in 2013.\u00a0Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department at the time about a supposed hostage situation at our\u00a0house. In response, a\u00a0heavily-armed police force surrounded my home<\/a>\u00a0and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax.<\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2017 15:49:39 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

A 19-year-old Canadian man was found guilty of making\u00a0almost three dozen fraudulent calls to emergency services across North America in 2013 and 2014. The false alarms, two of which targeted this author — involved phoning in phony bomb threats and multiple attempts at “swatting” — a dangerous hoax in which the perpetrator spoofs a call […]<\/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":[11400,15128,11401,10644,15129,8419,10745,15130,15131],"class_list":["post-9531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-independent","category-krebs","tag-cosmo-the-god","tag-curtis-gervais","tag-eric-taylor","tag-other","tag-probablyonion","tag-rcmp","tag-swatting","tag-the-ottawa-citizen","tag-u-s-ontario-court-justice-mitch-hoffman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531","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=9531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}