Hoax school shooting calls keep happening, and there's a pattern (October 2022)

To me the most significant line is this:

>The rapid-fire dialing of numbers also indicates that the user had a list of targets at the ready, and a specific focus on schools, law enforcement agencies, fire departments and emergency dispatchers. Together, these accounted for 92% percent of the places that the VOIP number called.

Hundreds of calls all across the country in short bursts, focused on a few states at a time. Whatever it is, it was an intentional campaign. I would think a state actor or state-associated actor (if that's an important distinction) might do it as part of a campaign to exploit existing cultural stressors.

I know from my experience on the east coast that multiple additional calls have occurred since Oct 21.

This article claims that the hoax calls must be someone operating out of Ethiopia, based on IP address geolocation. This is wrong; the attacker is almost certainly somewhere else, proxying their traffic through a random compromised computer. Attributing cybersecurity incidents this way basically never works; if someone is doing major cybersecurity mischief, this implies they have both the skills and the motivation to set up a proxy like this.

Is there some form of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect here? This doesn’t seem true:

> For instance, Mack noted that on the day her office received the false bomb alert, the caller stayed on the same IP address through hundreds of calls they made over several hours.

> "A VPN will generally change by itself, whether you log in or out, about every 30 seconds," she said.

Bandwidth.com and TextNow have been on my shitlists for years.

What is the best way for an end user to block an entire carrier? Can it be done? Can it be done if you are a business?

One motive I can see is to inflate the reports of school shootings. How often is news reported, then "if" there is a debunking, in print its inside the back page whereas the initial report was a lead on the front page. Starting a story is much harder than stopping a story, especially when motivation is considered.