Twenty-Four Seven Security

A former student of Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, started sending bomb threats to his former high school using a gmail account under a false name. According to Security Focus, the threats created havoc at the high school, forcing the school into daily evacuations the week of June 4, 2007. A bomb threat had also been issued a week earlier, but had used a handwritten note.

The person making the threats taunted the police and the FBI in their inability to find him, claiming he his threats were coming from a computer in Italy. “Seriously, you are not going to catch me. So just give up," the student wrote, "maybe you should hire Bill Gates to tell you that it is coming from Italy."

Also, various students received requests to link to a MySpace page, “TimberlineBombInfo,” where the suspect had used the name of another student to send the invitations with AOL Instant Messenger. The student whose name was used was forced to withdraw from the school and transferred elsewhere.

The Internet addresses used to sign-up for the Gmail and MySpace accounts came from an ISP in Italy, and the address used to post the bomb threats came from a computer at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy. Because of the likelihood that those systems had been hijacked, the FBI enlisted a Trojan horse program, called the Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV), to track down the suspect.

The FBI sent the spywear to the admin of the “Timberlinebombinfo” MySpace account, where the program would record the IP address, dates, and times data was sent, without recording any of the content. The ex-student was quickly apprehended, and received 90 days in juvenile detention after pleading guilty.