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University of Pittsburgh Deluged With Internet Bomb Threats
An anonymous reader writes "The University of Pittsburgh has been plagued with 78 bomb threats (and counting) since February 14. It started low-tech, with handwritten notes, but has progressed to anonymous emails. Nearly every campus building has been a target. The program suspected is anonymous mailer Mixmaster. The university has been evacuating each building when threats come in (day or night), and police departments from around Allegheny County have offered assistance with clearing each building floor by floor with bomb sniffing dogs. There is a popular tracking blog set up by a student as well as a growing Reddit community. Is there any foreseeable defense (forensic or socially engineered) to a situation like this?"
Actually, some do. The IRA was famous for telling people where their bombs were going to be. Real bombs, too. It achieves an awful lot of terror with less blood on your hands: they know that the bomb could have gone off. As long as there's some blood on your hands, your opponents know that you're willing to do it. Most of the terror, far less mess.
The goal of terrorism is to make people so upset that they give in to your demands. In this case, it may be simply to make people upset. It's working very well.
Why would a real bomber warn anyone?
Many terrorist groups routinely send bomb warnings when they have planted a bomb. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, the practice was so common that the IRA and the police had recognised code words they could use so that the police would know it was a real bomb rather than a hoax call.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Lots of universities in the Pittsburgh area are getting bomb threats. I know CCAC is getting a bunch of them, too. They're now checking everyone's bags when they go into the building.
:(){
Easy formula: No bomb threats are credible. Actual bombings are in the vast majority of cases not preceded by threats. You might as well evacuate a building every time a squirrel shits on the lawn, because the correlation between that event and an actual bombing is about as strong as it is between bombings and bomb threats.
I have no idea what the ratio of warnings of bombings to actual bombings is, but there are certainly examples of groups that issued warnings before they bombed. The US group the Weather Underground did.
The bombing attacks mostly targeted government buildings, along with several banks. Most were preceded by evacuation warnings, along with communiqués identifying the particular matter that the attack was intended to protest. For the bombing of the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971, they issued a communiqué saying it was "in protest of the U.S. invasion of Laos." For the bombing of the Pentagon on May 19, 1972, they stated it was "in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi." For the January 29, 1975 bombing of the United States Department of State building, they stated it was "in response to escalation in Vietnam."
The IRA frequently sent warnings before it bombed.
The bombing of the King David hotel in Jerusalem on July 29, 1946, was allegedly preceded by warnings. Menachem Begin claimed that three warnings were sent out on July 22nd 1946 about the planned attack to keep casualties to the minimum. Warnings were sent by telephone, including one to the hotel's own switchboard, which the hotel staff decided to ignore, but none directly to the British authorities. A possible reason why the warning was ignored was that hoax bomb warnings were rife at the time. The British did not evacuate the hotel and the bombing killed 91 people and injured 45. Imagine the repercussions for the University of Pittsburgh if it ignored a bomb warning and 91 people died and 45 were injured.
I agree, they have to treat every threat as a possible real danger.
I'll admit that the likelyhood of there being more than one person sending in the threats is at least moderate - copycats who thought it was a laugh at the beginning, but I'd say now after 70+ there is also most likely a large percentage of those threats that came from one individual.
Now to go a bit 'criminal minds'-ish on you, but if you'll indulge, many cases of criminal behaviour which lead to rather random events (bombings, spree shootings, serial killings) and others that are more common will have an individual who will send bizarre and often non-sensical warnings beforehand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh#Plan_against_federal_building_or_individuals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber#Manifesto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_sam#Letters_and_profiling
Just a few examples. So perhaps it's possible we have an individual here who has a grudge or some twisted mission. They begin to send letters, hoping for action, attention. Suddenly things are happening, people are being evacuated, the media is listening, even another man (ex-professor) was arrested for sending threatening emails. What if there is a next stage in their plan?
I honestly hope there isn't and it's just some fool who has let a prank get way out of hand, but I don't think they should ignore any threats because the results could be devastating.
I believe he is right. If someone wants to bomb, they will not warn you, they will just do it.
Wrong. The IRA routinely planted actual bombs AND reported them, because it caused just as much fear and disruption and didn't turn as many people away from them.
The IRA were as pissed as the police with false bomb threats as theirs would be taken less seriously, hence the IRA giving code words to go along with the threat so the police could verify it was from them.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Two of the victims parents sued the school for not notifying the student body earlier to warn them that the domestic violence case they had contained earlier that morning would erupt into the worst school shooting in US history, and won.
No, that's a over-simplification of what happened. There were several issues.
The campus police department didn't have the authority, nor the mechanism to directly issue an emergency alert to the student body telling them "to stay inside and lock their doors because a shooter was on the loose", so even when they knew what was happening, which took a very long while in itself, they still couldn't notify the entire school without going first through an outdated manual and a barrage of school officials that acted as the gatekeepers to that system.
You should try Google, it often can find interesting information. For example you could type in "ira code bomb". The search engine can also find information on many other subjects.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The early attacks on service personnel and politicians were often without warning or with inadequate warnings. The Eniskillen bomb was without warning, as far as I recall. The Deal Barracks bombing in 1989 had no warning (considered cowardly because the victims were cadets). The Brighton Hotel bombing was warned of (in intelligence channels) but no coded warning was sent.
Attacks on civilian targets sometimes did (late 80s and 90s attacks generally did): The Warrington campaign (1993) did have warnings but they weren't acted on in time and one was confusing. The St Mary Axe (Baltic Exchange) bomb was warned of but there were still civilian casualties, and the Bishopsgate bomb was warned of, and killed only a journalist who jumped the cordon.
(The chronologies on Wikipedia are useful here).
I don't remember if any of the other paramilitaries on either side of the conflict -- while the Provisionals were active -- had a habit of hoax threats; it never seemed to me to be a time when a bomb threat from a dissident source was taken as anything other than serious, and I had the luxury of being in mainland Britain. (But close enough to Deal, in a CCF-affiliated school, that every bomb threat took on added significance).
The only notable example of an abused warning that I remember is Omagh; there the bomb warning was called in precisely to drive people into the path of the real device. But that was the Real IRA; a twisted spinoff of the Provisional IRA that sprang into existence after the first serious and credible peace agreement. (There may be other abused warnings, and certainly military targets received inadequate warnings).
If the years of news about Anonymous has taught us one thing, it's that you always get caught for the really ugly stuff, eventually. It doesn't matter how clever you are. Hell, Ted Kaczynski was a bona fide genius, with no connectivity, no discernible error trails, living out in the damn woods without any real human contact. They got him too (tip from family based on verbiage of his manifesto, iirc).
Feds might not have a magic button to find you with, but they'll stay at it until they do. They've got huge budgets, legal clout everywhere, and all the time in the world to work it out.
It's just a matter of time.
And so did ETA in Spain. In fact, when after the bombings in Madrid people started pointing fingers at ETA, one of the first things that was offered as a rebuttal was their track record at informing of previous bombings.
While my Mum was still at school in Belfast, they were getting daily/weekly bomb threats for a quite a while. The headmaster then declared that any time lost due to bomb scares would be made up at the end of term over summer. The bomb threats stopped immediately...
The US federal gov't can easily step in, ask remailers to either reveal the sender, log the connections or deny.
You obviously don't know anything about remailers. I operated one for a few years, so allow me to say what should've been blatantly obvious:
The operator can not identify the sender. Mixmaster is a type II remailer. Those are specifically designed to make such attacks unfeasable, and continue to operate and provide anonymity even in the event that one or several remailers in the chain have been subverted.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org