Vincent Arnold

A former Washington high school student received 90 days in juvenile detention this week after pleading guilty to charges stemming from a rash of bomb threats and being tracked down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation through the use of a Trojan horse that identified his computer.

The student used a false name and other pseudonyms in e-mail addresses registered with Google’s Gmail to send bomb threats to Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, FBI Special Ageny Norman Sanders Jr. stated in an affidavit. The threats caused daily evacuations of the school the week of June 4, 2007. An earlier bomb threat, which evacuated the school on May 30, was found in a handwritten note.

The sender of the threats had claimed to be using a computer in Italy and taunted police and the FBI for their apparent lack of success in locating him, according to the affidavit.

“Seriously, you are not going to catch me. So just give up,” the student wrote, according to the court filing. “Maybe you should hire Bill Gates to tell you that it is coming from Italy.”

More than thirty students at the school received a request from the suspect to link to a MySpace page, “Timberlinebombinfo.” The suspect had used another student’s name to send the invitations using America Online’s Instant Messenger.

Full article and source: Security Focus

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Attack Vector.