Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Defense=stop taking every bomb threat as a credible threat.
The IRA often called in ahead of time about bombs they had placed.
How many bombers have preempted their bombing with 78 false threats?
I think you need to add a few more ".9" to your statistic there. And with enough there, no, it doesn't make it worth it. I'm ok with the risk of meteor impact as I walk outside. I could go live in a bunker and protect myself from that threat, or I could just accept that life isn't safe.
And you don't have to simply ignore the threats. You can, oh I dunno, STOP EVACUATING each and every time. Call in the dogs, sweep the place with the people still there, and if it's a non-issue as usual, it's just the cost of a K9 unit working constantly.
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.
Perhaps they shouldn't have set up the "submit an anonymous bomb threat" web site?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And they identified themselves.
The lesson? when the IRA calls about putting a bomb there, evacuate.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Jerry Sandusky worked for Penn State - this is the University of Pittsburgh.
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.
:(){
Soon enough someone will catch on that they can really increase their law enforcement power/budget/detail/department, pass some laws, and maybe get rid of some civil rights because of this. If enough people get pissed off enough, they will happily trade some freedoms for making this all go away.
I'm surprised the TSA hasn't jumped in on this, setting up checkpoints and searching people anywhere they want on campus. Its the perfect situation to lend credibility to their viper program.
Virginia Tech found a domestic murder case in a dorm five years ago, police came, followed standard procedure. Four hours later 30 more students and the assailant were dead after a horrific shooting spree on the opposite side of campus. Nothing like it had ever happened before on any US campus, and probably had never happened anywhere in the US in historical memory. 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.
You want to know how to destroy a school - stop responding to any threats, credible or not. If a real bomb does go off, the school will never survive.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Decentralize.
Get rid of the campus, and operate entirely online. Students take their courses online, they get graded online, and because there is no central meeting place, there is no place that would make an effective bomb target, whether a warning is given or not.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is there any foreseeable defense (forensic or socially engineered) to a situation like this?
Not if you also want an internet that maintains any kind of privacy.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
the BOFH at the university of pittsburg shrugged and remarked, "check with that new CS PHD who just had to have his crontab restored on a saturday night. Its been filling up the outbound mail spool all damn day."
Good people go to bed earlier.
At one university I went to, students who were not ready for their midterms did the fire alarm pull. At a different university, it was anonymous bomb threats via payphone. Anyone got any other delaying tactics at institutions they attended?
You want to know how to destroy a school - stop responding to any threats, credible or not. If a real bomb does go off, the school will never survive.
The real threat seems to be the lawyers.
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
This is terrorism done right. Except the threat frequency should be dialed down to the point where each one must be viewed as credible. And the program should be duplicated across hundreds of campuses across the United States. Not to mention other facilities besides universities. And, every once in a while, one of the threats should turn out to be genuine, just to keep people honest. Cheap and effective.
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).
Curious that the conversation centers in if the thread are real or not instead of how easily is to completely disrupt normal activities and cause incredible spending. Reminds me a lot of the statement by Al Queda that for every dolar they spend the US loses thousands. Makes me wonder how much of US economic activity (jobs/money) now resides with security and vigilance of all sorts.
Why don't we let the students figure it out?