Hacker Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai Arrested For Taking Down 911 Center, Says It Was “Funny”
Hacker Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai Arrested For Taking Down 911 Center, Says It Was “Funny”
Maricopa County, Arizona – Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cyber Crimes Unit arrests hacker Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai who launched a cyber attack against a 911 center.
On October 24th, 2016, a hacker launched a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service attack) which disrupted the emergency 911 system for the entire Phoenix metro area. A DDoS attack is a common hacker tactic that sends tons of useless information into a network, which ties it up and causes it to shut down or become unavailable to users. 18-year-old Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai was arrested on 3 counts of Computer Tampering, which is a class 2 felony.
Desai created a link, that when clicked, would cause victims phones to dial the 911 service and not be able to hang up. He posted this link to a twitter account with 12,000 followers. The link was clicked 1,849 times and the Surprise Police Depart received over 100 hang up calls because of it. Authorities were able to shut down the website before more people could click the link and completely take down the 911 system. The calls had the potential to shut down the 911 emergency center for all of Maricopa County.
Sheriff’s Detectives identified Desai and took him into custody for questioning. In the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office press releases on the incident, Dasai explained that he was “interested in programs, bugs, and viruses which he could manipulate and change to later inform Apple about to fix their bug issues for further ios updates. He claimed that Apple would pay for information about bugs and viruses and provide that particular programmer with credit for the discovery.”
Too bad for Dasai, he wont be allowed to touch a computer for a very long time, if ever again.
He also told investigators that he thought the bug he created to disrupt emergency 911 systems was “funny” and he developed it to be recognized in the hacker community.
