Security News > 2020 > December > Hacker Gets 8 Years in Prison for Threats to Schools, Airlines
A North Carolina man was sentenced to 95 months in federal prison for his involvement in multiple cyber and swatting attacks.
Responsible for making threats of shootings and bombings to numerous schools located in the United States and United Kingdom, Vaughn was sentenced to 95 months in prison for child pornography and 60 months for each of the other charges.
According to the United States Department of Justice, Vaughn was a member of an international collective of hackers and swatters known as Apophis Squad. The group operated by placing threatening phone calls, sending bogus email reports of attacks at schools, and launching distributed denial-of-service attacks, all meant to cause disruption.
In these emails, Vaughn and others claimed the detonation of a bomb, land mines on sports fields, and rocket-propelled grenade heads under school buses.
Vaughn engaged in DDoS extortion in early 2018, when he demanded 1.5 Bitcoin from a Long Beach company, threatening he would launch a DDoS attack on the firm's website.