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Student Faces 38 Years In Prison For Hacking Grades
the brown guy writes "An 18-year-old high school student named Omar Kahn is charged with 69 felonies for hacking into a school computer and modifying his grades, among other things. He changed his C, D and F grades to As, and changed 12 other students grades as well. By installing a remote access program on the school's server, Kahn was able to also change his AP scores and distribute test answer keys, and could be looking at a lengthy prison term. Not surprisingly, his parents (who have only recently immigrated to America) have decided not to post the $50,000 bail and Kahn is in jail awaiting trial."
My school server (NetWare) is just as bad. Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.
:)", freaked a lot of people out).
First off, desktops are fairly locked down. But the server itself allows for RDP connections with any username (not just teachers or students).
When you're on any old desktop, you can only access your own network share as a virtual drive. When you're connected to the school server, you get:
-Any documents (class of 2006 or 2007, class of 2008-2011, teachers, ADMINS)
-Network shares with installer sources and keys in text files (e.x. Microsoft Office 2007 Pro Plus with VLK, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, EasyGrade Pro 3, Houghton Mifflin Test Generator to accompany textbooks, etc.)
-Access to the attendance share (which is outsourced, but the administrative login is kept on said server in house)
-Access to backups from the other schools (junior high, intermediate, elementary)
I was appalled when I found this out. For ethical reasons (and the legal penalties), I decided not to tell anyone or anything. Mainly because in 8th grade, my friend got his computer privileges suspended for the year when we told the computer staff that you could get a command prompt through Internet Explorer, and he almost got a disciplinary record over it.
We tried to help them, and he got in trouble (luckily, no legal issues).(We'd send NET SEND messages to other computers - e.g. "Jane, this is the computer. That's a nice purple sweater you're wearing
Ever since, whenever I've found a computer issue, I've kept my mouth shut, because it's not worth the trouble.
More on topic...this guy has what's coming to him. I think 38 years is too harsh (maybe a couple of years and more punishment in probation), but his malicious intent and clear intent makes me have no sympathy for him.
Because its not about 'Us vs Government' in this case, its about 'Us vs Us' - this wasn't a crime against the nation or government, it was a crime that has the potential to reduce other peoples efforts at education.
I can agree to that. When I has in grad school I was applying for a scholarship (because I could not afford the school) and was told I was beat out by a foreign student with much better grades than me. A month later they offered me the scholarship (and instructor in charge told me that the transcript they received was forged and the student did not have perfect grades). So what this Omar guy did was trivialize the grades of the students who actually got good grades and worked hard for them (possibly ruining their chances at getting into a great school). The real victims are other students not the government or the education system.
During my first year of post-secondary education, but the introductory physics and calculus classes administered quizes and assignments through a flash-based web-app. The school's computers all used IE 5 at the time (2000/2001) but if you logged in through the school's network using your own computer, you could access all the material. Using Netscape on my laptop, I remember that I used to be prompted before submitting the results from the flash app (Netscape security to the rescue). The app calculated the score itself and reported only the score to the server. It was a simply matter not to transmit the score and refresh the page to try again if people weren't happy with their scores.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Reminds me of a business school student who was caught hacking his way to president of the business school student body. He didn't verbally brag, but he arrogantly gave himself a landslide win - more votes than there were students. He didn't get prison but he didn't get his tuition back after being expelled.
Reminds me of a story about my father when he was back in school.
He had a French test on verb conjugation coming up, so instead of studing he spent much time making a clever crib sheet mechanism into his watch, so that he could scroll through the crib sheet.
Anyway, while 'preparing', he kept rewriting the crib sheet smaller and smaller to fit more stuff on it. Ironically, when he went to take the test, he already knew the material from all his recopying that he didn't even need to cheat.
make world, not war