What a dumbass.
From the Associated Press:
A computer hacker was sentenced to three years in prison for placing a phony 911 call that led a SWAT team to storm a family home at gunpoint.
It marked the first prosecution in Orange County for a prank known as “swatting” that involves sending SWAT teams on wild goose chases, said county district attorney’s spokeswoman Farrah Emami on Thursday.
Randal T. Ellis, 19, pleaded guilty Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court to five felony counts, including computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence and falsely reporting a crime.
He was given prison time and ordered to pay $14,765 in restitution, most of which will go to the county Sheriff’s Department.
Wow…this could have cost someone their life. Read on.
“Wow…this could have cost someone their life.”
Indeed. Swatting is a particularly bad deal in that you are almost always anonymous (unless you mess up such as this kid did) and all 911 reports generally must be followed up on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting
I work for an organization that provides a variety of critical infrastructure services, including fielding first responders such as police and fire. We practice incident response scenarios that include a flood of legitimate-sounding 911 traffic in order to understand how we might be able to triage the real reports that come in between the cruft. If you DoS a 911 call center with fake reports and don’t have a method to triage, people will indeed die.
An example of how difficult it is for ill-funded organizations (remember that most 911 call centers are run by City or County government that prioritizes fixing potholes before critical infrastructure protection) to track down callers:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/14/BATLV38B8.DTL