14 DAY TRIAL // The UK National Crime Agency announced that a 19-year old teenager named George Duke-Cohan from Hertfordshire has been arrested and pleaded guilty to making hoax bomb threats against 400 different schools and a United Airlines intercontinental flight.
Until his arrest, Duke-Cohan also known as “7R1D3N7,” “Optcz1” and “DoubleParallax” was a member of the Apophis Squad hacker group, very active on Twitter and known to brag about attacking several websites using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) techniques, with Protonmail.com and KrebsOnSecurity.com being the most known.
Among other online mischiefs, they also attacked government agencies from a multitude of countries, a fact that made them the target of multiple MLAT requests asking Protonmail to deliver assistance in catching them after Apophis Squad's members were exposed as also being Protonmail users.
“What we found, combined with intelligence provided by renowned cyber security journalist Brian Krebs, allowed us to conclusively identify Duke-Cohan as a member of Apophis Squad in the first week of August, and we promptly informed law enforcement,” Protonmail said on their blog.
Duke-Cohan also faces a few more charges and a possible extradition to the US
According to ProtonMail founder Andy Yen, the British police did not make any immediate moves to arrest Duke-Cohan with good reason, but this "led to a very unfortunate incident involving United Airlines Flight 949."
In a press release published on September 4, the National Crime Agency said that “In a recording of one of the phone calls which was made while the plane was in the air, he takes on the persona of a worried father and claims his daughter contacted him from the flight to say it had been hijacked by gunmen, one of whom had a bomb."
Duke-Cohan eventually got arrested on August 21, following some other incidents most of them being more bomb threats against schools, right after the start of the new school year in the UK.
Other members of Apophis Squad might soon get arrested too seeing that they have already been identified during Protonmail investigation with the help of other cybersecurity experts who are also Protonmail users.