On the morning of Friday, December 1, several schools in Bengaluru received bomb threats via email, prompting authorities to initiate evacuations for student safety. As thousands of students and teachers were evacuated, anti-sabotage and bomb squads from the city police conducted checks on school premises. The police noted that these email threats closely resembled those sent to multiple schools in 2022. While the police traced the code of the program used to send the mails in 2022 to a minor in Tamil Nadu, they weren’t able to determine the person/s responsible for sending the threat emails.
Following Friday’s threat mails, Bengaluru police Commissioner B Dayanand said that bomb detection and disposal squads had been rushed to the schools, and urged the public to not panic. He said that the emails were being examined by the police.
On April 8, 2022, 16 schools in Bengaluru received hoax bomb threat emails between 11 am and 2.30 pm. The messages warned of a potent bomb in the schools and urged immediate action. “A very powerful bomb has been planted in your school, attention is not a joke, this is not a joke, a very powerful bomb has been planted in your school, immediately call the police and sappers, hundreds of lives may suffer including yours, do not delay, now everything is only in your hands!” the email had said. Delhi Public School in Varthur, Gopalan International School, New Academy School, St Vincent Paul School, Indian Public School, Govindpura and Ebenezer International School in Electronic City were the schools that received bomb threats in 2022.
The police registered a case of cyber terrorism and launched an investigation that found a minor from Tamil Nadu as the source of the email IDs used to issue the threats. Further examination revealed that the minor had created a program to conceal internet protocol (IP) addresses, facilitating the mass sending of emails.The probe revealed that the same application was used by others to dispatch the threatening messages.