Police arrest teen and seize guns after online threats to 'shoot up school'
A Florida teenager was arrested and charged on Sunday in connection with what police called online threats to "shoot up" a high school, before seizing a collection of guns and protective vests.
The 17-year-old was arrested after police in Sanford, less than an hour north of Orlando, were alerted to a video allegedly featuring him threatening to launch an attack on nearby Seminole High School.
He has been charged with intimidation through making a written or electronic threat of mass shooting or a terrorist act. The teenager is a student at Elevation High School, also in Sanford, and was arrested without incident at his home, police said.
Police said they acted on an anonymous tip received Saturday, which pointed them to the video that showed multiple guns.
The Orlando Sentinel reported, citing court documents, that in the video the teenager claimed to have an extensive arsenal, including an AK-47 assault rifle, a SVD rifle, a Glock 19 handgun and a M4 rifle.
When police searched his home, however, they instead found airsoft weapons and an airsoft vest. They also seized a laptop, iPhone, a knife and a notebook from the house, the Sentinel reported.
Sanford Police Chief Cecil Smith said the 17-year-old was quickly identified as the person in the video thanks to the quick collaboration of multiple agencies including the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, Homeland Security, the FBI and Seminole County Public Schools.
"This fast action and team work most likely prevented a tragedy and saved multiple lives," he said in a statement.
Superintendent Serita Beamon said: "I am so thankful for the collaborative work and relentless dedication of all the agencies involved in bringing this incident to a conclusion."
There has so far been one planned school shooting in the United States this year, at a high school in Nashville in January, when one student was killed and another was injured. The suspect fatally shot himself.
A 19-year-old gunman killed 17 people at his former school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
Anyone with information on the Seminole County case is asked to contact Sanford Police Department or Crimeline at 800 423-TIPS (8477) or visit www.crimeline.org, which they can do anonymously.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ITV News
8 hours ago
- ITV News
Northwich man jailed again after running drugs ring from his prison cell
The moment Samuel Watts was arrested as he left HMP Kirkham after serving a previous sentence A man who saw his prison term as an "inconvenience rather than a punishment" has been jailed once more after he admitted dealing drugs from his cell. Samuel Watts, 34, was serving a three-year prison term at HMP Kirkham, in Preston, after he admitted being concerned in the supply of cocaine and cannabis and possession of a weapon. But by July 2024 police uncovered intelligence suggesting that Watts, of Thornley Green in Northwich, Cheshire, had a mobile phone and was coordinating the sale of illegal drugs in the town from his prison cell. Watts was later searched in his cell where prison officers discovered an iPhone strapped to his waist, which later analysis showed carried a string of messages proving he was involved in the sale of illegal drugs. He was then arrested as he left HMP Kirkham following his release for his previous offences, in November 2024, and has now been sentenced to four years and four months in prison at Burnley Crown Court. Following the sentencing Police Constable Dan Lee, of Cheshire Police's Northwich Proactive CID, said: 'Watts saw his initial prison sentence as an inconvenience rather than a punishment. "After smuggling a mobile phone into the prison, he thought that he could simply continue to run his criminal enterprise from behind bars, directing people lower down the chain to deliver drugs on his behalf. 'However, he clearly underestimated the dedication and determination of the team here at Northwich Proactive CID. "As soon as we became aware of his latest activities we brought them to a swift conclusion and were ready to arrest him as he was released from prison. 'I welcome the latest sentence handed to Watts and hopefully this time he'll use his time behind bars to reflect upon his actions rather than trying to set up another business venture, otherwise we'll be waiting for him again next time he's released.'
NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
High-profile Americans' iPhones may have been targeted in hacking campaign, says cybersecurity firm for Harris-Walz
One of the few companies to specialize in iPhone cybersecurity said in a report Thursday that it has uncovered evidence in a handful of mobile phones of a potentially groundbreaking hacking campaign targeting five high-profile Americans in media, artificial intelligence and politics, including former members of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. The preliminary research, conducted by the cybersecurity firm iVerify, includes a significant amount of circumstantial evidence,' iVerify CEO Rocky Cole said. Apple, the maker of the iPhone, refuted the findings. But Cole stood by the report's significance for research purposes. Apple's reputation is sterling among security professionals, and if a hack occurred, it would be a significant development in the cybersecurity industry. IVerify has not identified who may be behind the potential hacking operation, but believes the targets and technical sophistication suggest a capable spy agency may have been involved. Two people familiar with the investigation told NBC News that former members of the Harris-Walz campaign were some of the people iVerify believes were targeted. It's not clear what initially set off the investigation. IVerify said that in addition to the Americans who were targeted, a European government official's iPhone had indications of remote tampering. It appears that last year, a hacker remotely and secretly installed a type of invasive, malicious program known as spyware to snoop on those users without their knowledge, iVerify said. Out of nearly 50,000 phones that iVerify analyzed, it found only six — all belonging to high-profile people who would be potential targets for an espionage campaign — that showed evidence of exploitation. Apple disputed iVerify's conclusion that its evidence is a strong indication that iPhones were hacked. 'We've thoroughly analyzed the information provided by iVerify, and strongly disagree with the claims of a targeted attack against our users. Based on field data from our devices, this report points to a conventional software bug that we identified and fixed in iOS 18.3,' Ivan Krstić, the head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture, said in an emailed statement. Apple is 'not currently aware of any credible indication that the bug points to an exploitation attempt or active attack,' Krstić said. IVerify CEO Rocky Cole responded in a statement: 'In light of the recent public conversation around mobile security, there is ample evidence in the report worth sharing with the research community. We've never claimed there is a smoking gun here, only a significant amount of circumstantial evidence.' iVerify's report makes it clear it did not directly catch malicious software that took over phones. Instead, its researchers found evidence that it had been installed, then deleted. The phones suspected of being hacked displayed suspicious activity in crash logs, the records a computer or a smartphone automatically writes when the operating system encounters an error or a program fails. That indicates tampering, the company said. 'We identified exceedingly rare crash logs that appeared exclusively on devices belonging to high-risk individuals including government officials, political campaign staff, journalists, and tech executives,' the report says. 'At least one affected European Union government official received an Apple Threat Notification approximately thirty days after we observed this crash on their device, and forensic examination of another device revealed signs of successful exploitation.' Andrew Hoog, a co-founder of the mobile phone security company NowSecure, told NBC News that he found iVerify's 'analysis and conclusions credible and consistent with what we've observed over nearly a decade of mobile zero-click attacks.' If a spyware campaign has been taking over high-profile Americans' phones, it would be a major escalation in the back-and-forth between cyberspies and the security engineers who try to stop them. The iPhone's cybersecurity is widely revered, and cybersecurity experts largely view iPhones as some of the most secure devices that are commercially available. Apple routinely updates its operating system to fix flaws that hackers use to break in. But it has also designed the iPhone operating system to share very little information with cybersecurity researchers, far less than most other operating systems. iVerify's claim comes in the context of other allegations that cyberspies snooped on the 2024 presidential campaigns, including the United States' accusing China of listening to both parties' presidential campaigns' phone calls and Iran of hacking Trump campaign emails and sending stolen information to Biden campaign officials. The Biden administration's Justice Department charged three Iranians in connection with the operation in September. Researchers have for years tracked governments' use of spyware to spy on journalists and activists in other countries. Politicians in France and Spain have been targeted by spyware, prompting national scandals. IVerify's report is the first major public claim of spyware's successfully breaking into iPhones tied to American phone numbers and high-profile Americans. There is precedent for cyberspies' targeting major political campaigns. Last year, Microsoft, Google and several federal agencies said Chinese intelligence had hacked several major telecommunications companies, including AT&T and Verizon, and used that access to specifically spy on both the Trump and Harris campaigns ' conversations. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump campaign did not hire iVerify, so it does not have data from it to analyze. Sources who confirmed that members of the Harris-Waltz campaign were among those whom iVerify has investigated as targets of the campaign did not identify those people. iVerify also discovered a potential way hackers could have gotten in: a vulnerability in iMessage, the chat app that comes preloaded in Apple phones, that appears to be a zero-click vulnerability, meaning a hacker could exploit it without the user's even knowing. Apple has since patched the vulnerability. Spyware can give remote hackers remarkable insight into their victims' personal messages and accounts. While confirmed instances are rare, it is the only proven tactic for hackers to reliably bypass the major privacy protections available for commercial phones, like the encrypted messaging app Signal. A hacker who successfully deploys spyware on politicians' phones, for instance, could read all their Signal chats, track their browsing histories, listen to their phone calls and even turn the phones into covert listening devices to spy on conversations while they are in the targets' pockets. By giving a hacker remote access to a phone, spyware goes beyond even the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, in which the United States accused China last year of hacking AT&T and Verizon to intercept phone calls and text messages as they traveled from one person to another — including targeting the messages of both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns. The most commonly identified spyware in such cases is designed by the Israeli company NSO Group, which is sanctioned by the United States and has long claimed its products cannot be used to hack phones with American numbers. An NSO Group spokesperson told NBC News it was not involved in the incidents iVerify's research identified. American diplomats and embassy workers abroad have also been infected with NSO spyware, according to the Biden White House, but evidence that such technology had targeted a U.S. presidential campaign or other high-profile Americans in the United States has never been previously reported. 'I think it illustrates that mobile compromise is real, not academic or hypothetical, and it's happening here in the United States in a systematic way,' said Cole, iVerify's CEO. He declined to specify the identities of the five people whose phones exhibited signs of having been targeted with spyware, except to say that they are all Americans who work in politics, media and artificial intelligence and that all would be of interest to a foreign intelligence service. The fact that sophisticated phone spyware is becoming the most reliable way to read a person's otherwise secure messages makes it an obvious tactic for spy agencies, despite its technical difficulty, said Patrick Arvidson, a National Security Agency veteran who worked on mobile phone security at the agency, who viewed iVerify's report before it was published. 'I think that you're going to see in the coming year, two years, three years, more and more of these kinds of mass-scale incidents,' he said.
Daily Record
a day ago
- Daily Record
Missing UK tourist found dead at bottom of lift shaft in Malaysia
Brit backpacker Jordan Johnson-Doyle, 25, disappeared on May 27 in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. He was last seen at a bar in a suburb. The body of a missing tourist who vanished in Malaysia has been found in a lift shaft a week after he vanished. Brit backpacker Jordan Johnson-Doyle, 25, disappeared on May 27 in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur after he was last seen at a bar in a suburb. As the Mirror reports, a major search was launched by police after he was reported missing. Tragically the search has ended after he was found dead in a lift shaft at the ground floor of a construction site. A post-mortem found the cause of death was a horror "chest injury sustained from fall from height", according to police chief Rusdi Mohd. Police have ruled out any foul play. The police chief added: "No criminal elements were found at the scene and the case has been classified as a sudden death report." Jordan was last seen at Healey Mac's Irish Bar in the Bangsar area of the city. He had sent his friend a photo of the pub's quiz poster before he is believed to have gone to a nearby bar called The Social. His devastated mum Leanna Burnett previously told how she felt"sick" and "numb" over his shock disappearance. Leanna used a tracking device 'find my iPhone' to trace her son's phone in a desperate search for him. The tracker showed the mobile was at a residential block close to the bar in the Kuala Lumpur suburb where Jordan had been. Leanna said she last spoke to her son on May 26 just a day before he disappeared. She previously said: "He seemed absolutely fine and normal. Nothing stood out whatsoever. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. "We always end the phone call with 'love long time' and that was the very last thing we said to each other." Jordan had been backpacking around South East Asia at the time and had recently visited nearby country Vietnam on his travels. It is understood he arrived in Malaysia on May 17 and was staying at the Robertson Residences at Bukit, in Kuala Lumpur. Tributes have poured in for the software engineer. One social media user wrote to the family, they said: "So sorry for your his soul rest in peace, may God comfort n give strength to you n family in this difficult times. Sending love & hugs from Ipoh, Malaysia." Another added: "Deepest condolences and heartfelt sympathy to the family." Jordan Johnson-Doyle's death shares some similarities to that of Brit tourist Tyler Kerry, 20, who was found dead in a lift shaft in Turkey. Tyler was found unresponsive inside a lift shaft at the Trendy Lara Hotel in Antalya last year. It was believed Tyler opened the door believing the lift had arrived and walked through and into the empty shaft.
