Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai is an iPhone app developer.
The Maricopa County police in Arizona arrested an 18-year-old Indian American teenager for shutting down the 911 emergency phone service line.
Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai was arrested after the authorities tracked the origin of the code that led to shutting down the emergency service in major parts of Arizona and other neighboring states.
Desai, an iPhone app developer, posted a link on Twitter and shared the same with his friends. When someone clicked the link, their phone automatically made repeated calls to 911 that would not let the caller hang up, reported PTI.
The authorities lost the service to their switches as the volume of calls was too high. An investigation was initiated after the Surprise Police Department, Arizona, notified the Sheriff’s Office.
A press release from the Maricopa County’s Sheriff’s Office said: “The Surprise Police Department received the over (100) hang up 911 phone calls within a matter of minutes due to this cyber-attack and were in immediate danger of losing service to their switches. The Peoria Police Department and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office also received a large volume of these repeated 911 hang up calls and had the potential danger of losing service throughout Maricopa County.”
The police found that the link posted on Twitter was to a site named “Meet Desai” and its domain was hosted out of San Francisco. Last, Wednesday, the detectives identified Desai and took him for questioning.
“Sheriff’s Detectives were able to identify ‘Meet’ as the suspect behind the 911 disruption and was taken into custody and transported him to the Major Crimes Division for questioning late last night,” said the statement.
During interrogation, Desai said that he was interested in programs, bugs, and viruses which he could manipulate and change to later inform Apple about how 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.