Incorrigible SWATter George Duke-Cohan, a British teenager from a village near Watford, just north of London, has now been sentenced to three years in prison, according to the UK’s
National Crime Agency (NCA).
In September, Duke-Cohan – at 19, the most outspoken member of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) gang –
pleaded guilty to making bomb threats to
thousands of schools and to a United Airlines flight between the UK and San Francisco while it was in mid-air. The teenager sent bomb threats that resulted in
400 UK schools being evacuated in March. He was arrested just days later. While still under investigation in April, Duke-Cohan sent a mass email to schools in the UK and the US claiming that there were pipe bombs planted on their grounds. Then on 9 August, his hacking group – “Apophis Squad” – claimed on Twitter that flight UAL 949 had been grounded due to their actions. Later that month, he, or somebody else in Apophis Squad, was still gleefully rubbing their hands over the prospect of more threats when schools reopened.
The NCA says that its investigators, working with the FBI, determined that Duke-Cohan had made the bomb threat to the transatlantic flight by calling San Francisco Airport and FBI police. In one of the calls, Duke-Cohan pretended to be a worried father whose daughter contacted him from the flight to tell him it was being hijacked by gunmen, one of whom had a bomb. When the plane touched down in San Francisco, it was placed in a quarantined area of the airport and subjected to an intense security search. The NCA says that all 295 passengers had to remain on board, resulting in disruption to their journeys and financial loss to the airline. And, undoubtedly, a good amount of fear.
In the US and other countries, hoax bomb threats fall under the genre of crime called SWATting, which takes its name from elite law enforcement units called SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams. It’s the practice of making a false report to emergency services about shootings, bomb threats, hostage taking, or other alleged violent crime in the hopes that law enforcement will respond to a targeted address with deadly force. Convicted SWATters such as
Tyler Barriss will tell you that their intention isn’t to have anybody shot or killed. It is, rather, to shock or cause alarm. It doesn’t matter what Barriss’s “intention” was – it won’t buy back the life of 28-year-old Andrew Finch, whom police shot to death when responding to Barriss’s hoax call.
