Bomb Threat Hacker Gets 8-Year Prison Sentence

An American hacker has been sent to prison for carrying out a series of cyber and swatting attacks, including sending bogus threats of shootings and bombings to schools in the United Kingdom and the United States.

North Carolina resident Timothy Dalton Vaughn also called in a false report of an airplane hijacking involving a jetliner traveling from London to San Francisco.

The 22-year-old, known online by the handles “WantedbyFeds” and “Hacker_R_US,” was arrested in February 2019 by special agents with the FBI. 

Authorities found that Vaughn had in his possession 200 sexually explicit images and videos depicting children, including at least one toddler.

Vaughn was a member of a worldwide collective of computer hackers and swatters who call themselves the “Apophis Squad.” 

The squad caused disruptions by making threatening phone calls, sending false reports of violent school attacks via email, and launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on websites.

"Vaughn and others sent emails to at least 86 school districts threatening armed students and explosives," said the Department of Justice. 

"The threatened attacks included the imminent detonation of a bomb made with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, rocket-propelled grenade heads placed under school buses, and the placement of land mines on sports fields."

Squad members sometimes reported threats using "spoofed" email addresses to make it appear as though the reports had been sent by innocent parties, including the mayor of London.

Among the squad's victims was a Long Beach motorsport company whose website hoonigan.com was knocked offline for three d ..

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