Security News > 2020 > December > Bomb Threat, DDoS Purveyor Gets Eight Years

A 22-year-old North Carolina man has been sentenced to nearly eight years in prison for conducting bomb threats against thousands of schools in the U.S. and United Kingdom, running a service that launched distributed denial-of-service attacks, and for possessing sexually explicit images of minors.

Timothy Dalton Vaughn from Winston-Salem, N.C. was a key member of the Apophis Squad, a gang of young ne'er-do-wells who made bomb threats to more than 2,400 schools and launched DDoS attacks against countless Web sites - including KrebsOnSecurity on multiple occasions.

"In early 2018, Vaughn demanded 1.5 bitcoin from a Long Beach company, to prevent denial-of-service attacks on its website," reads a statement from Nicola Hanna, U.S. attorney for the Central District of California.

Vaughn used multiple aliases on Twitter and elsewhere to crow about his attacks, including "HDGZero," "WantedByFeds," and "Xavier Farbel." Among the Apophis Squad's targets was encrypted mail service Protonmail, which reached out to this author in 2018 for clues about the identities of the Apophis Squad members after noticing we were both being targeted by them and receiving demands for money in exchange for calling off the attacks.

Protonmail later publicly thanked KrebsOnSecurity for helping to bring about the arrest of Apophis Squad leader George Duke-Cohan - a.k.a. "Opt1cz," "7R1D3n7," and "Pl3xl3t," - a 19-year-old from the United Kingdom who was convicted in December 2018 and sentenced to three years in prison.

News URL

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/12/bomb-threat-ddos-purveyor-gets-eight-years/