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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."
He got caught - unlike me, because I didn't brag about it on a public web site...
Even being a security researcher I might find some of those tasks non-trivial. In highschool I'm pretty sure that kind of action was out of my league. He has certainly learned something.
Summary is unnecessarily sensational.
I'm willing to bet the 38 years is if he gets convicted for all the charges, and doesn't get any concurrent sentencing - very unlikely.
Beetle B.
Sure the kid is an idiot, but does he deserve 38 years? That's insane.
Kick him out of school. Hold him back a year. Put him to work in community service.
People who think he deserves 38 years in prison for being a teenage idiot probably deserve to be in prison themselves.
"You know, a D turns into a B so easily. You just got greedy."
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.
I don't know what so unsurprising about that. No parent wants their kid to spend time in freakin' lockup. Further, they can leverage $5,000 of real dollars with a bail bondsman to post $50k, so they just need to sell the kid's computer and scrape together a few thousand more to spare him potentially weeks behind bars.
Heck, banks will loan the money for bail, and I seriously doubt they get the loan-shark like interest the bail bondsman would.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Is at Gizmodo
The kid is also facing burglary charges because he stole a key to the school and used it to break in several times. The first thing to remember in this case is that it's not just a simple computer crime case, and that 12 other students also had their grades changed.
Further, of course the kid faces 38 years; every one of the small crimes he committed carry a maximum penalty. If you add them all up, you get 38 years. Obviously that doesn't mean that the kid is going to serve anywhere near that amount.
Now, I'm not sitting here saying that this kid should get 38 years. Far from it. But I do think that some jail time is called for. In addition to the burglary charge and the financial hit to fix the problems he caused, he hurt a lot of students. Consider this: For every one of the 13 kids who moved into the top 10% ranking, someone who had earned their spot had to leave. That student may not have been able to get into the college of his or her choice, and - far more importantly - may have missed out on substantial scholarship money. This kid wasn't just harming his high school through the added expense to audit records and security policies, he was hurting totally innocent fellow students.
I mean...what the kid did was dumb, granted. But should his ENTIRE life really be completely ruined because he tried to cheat and boost his test scores in fucking high school? Seriously? There are rapists that face less jail time. Murderers who face less jail time. Corrupt politicians who start wars with other nations, unprovoked...that face no jail time. And you're going to hop on the "he's getting what he deserves" bandwagon? Shit, I *DO* support that kid. And yes, he's just a kid. A dumb, arrogant kid that made a stupid mistake. But in the end, no ones been harmed except himself. Expell him from school. Make him repeat the 12th grade. Let him stand on his own two at a community college until he can prove that he's ready for a 4 year program. I just don't think this is worth destroying a life over......
Well, if his current modus operandi continues, I suspect the court's records will soon show his list of charges as being:
34 felony counts of awesomeness
11 felony counts of 1337 5ki11z.
7 felony counts of pwning n00bs.
6 felony counts of acting as an electronics deity.
4 felony counts of extreme overclocking.
3 felony counts of proving the Goldbach conjecture.
2 felony counts of saving the world from the Covenant.
1 felony count of conspiracy to pwn.
1 felony count of actually winning a fight against Chuck Norris.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
Whilst I'm really not a lawyer, it's worth pointing out that the legal use of the word "Conspiracy" doesn't necessarily imply that it was a Government/Anarchic/Terrorism related thing.
As ever, Wikipedia has something to say on the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(crime)
"In the criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between natural persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement."
This is one of the comments on the newspaper story:
He's NOT a hacker!
Jun 19, 2008 08:21
He's just lazy and stupid.
First off, this idiot goes to the same high-school as me - Tesoro High School. The guy is a total loser who just wastes his time trying to act cool and trying to "party it up" cause his family is relatively well off.
The "38 years in prison" is just a tagline. He *faces* that much time in prison because of the 69 seperate counts of felony charges, but he'll probably get a fine and probation and that's about it. (Well, that and getting blacklisted from the major schools that he had no shot of getting into.)
Secondly, since when has installing a keylogger program on a computer been considered hacking? In which case, we're all "hackers" cause we installed software on our PC. He doesn't know the first thing about programming. He asked me to fix his spyware infested computer on repeated occasions. The guy would get others to do his work for him and pay them off. He even asked people to take the SATs for him! jeez!
Lastly, he's a lazy idiot. He got caught AFTER he was denied admission to the UCs (yes, he still got rejected with his modified transcripts), when he tried to appeal the decision and have more transcripts sent out - that's when the counselor noticed the discrepency. If he had taken the time to study for the SATs instead, he'd be in by now, even with his terrible GPA.
What a ridiculous world we live in.
Amit
They didn't "turn him" into anything. He's a criminal. Period. I could write it off as misguided teenage mischief if he had changed his own grades. Maybe even a grade or two for a girl he was attempting to woo, but he changed grades for twelve people, stole tests and answers and distributed them, and burglarized his school to cover up the fact that - even after proving he could steal test and answers - he was still cheating.
Where's the "talent?" The only thing he did was read someone's password to initially "hack" the system, and I'll bet $20 that the "remote access program" was something he downloaded from some site with a name like "Teh Supar-3v1L Bl4ck Haxx0rZ La1r!" Giving him a pass because it's a nonviolent crime makes as much sense as letting off anybody who tunnels into a bank because they were clever. He's not talented, he's a sociopath. He should be expelled from school and they should staple a copy of the police report to any transcript they send to a college.
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.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
This kid isn't a genius. He's not talented. He isn't some sort of super child that did this because he was bored in school. He's a stupid script kiddie. He downloaded a keylogger from the internet then broke into the school office and installed it. What a computer wiz. The kid's a douche and this sentence probably just saves the court some time down the road. And he won't even get 38 years anyway so quit whining about how long that is.
He is facing "up to" 38 years. That means that if you take all of the charges against him, and he gets the max prison term for all of them, he will be in jail for 38 years. The chances of that happening are zero. What is going to happen is that if the evidence against him is good enough where he (his lawyers) think that he can't win, he will just make a plea deal with the prosecutors. If he serves any time after pleading guilty and making a plea deal, it will likely be under a year. In all likelihood he will just get put on probation for a few years. Probation sucks, but it beats prison... and well, it is supposed to suck. It is a punishment, and punishments tend to suck.
More accurately--the kid just ruined his own life completely. Taking responsibility for choices we make is all part of growing up.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Of course it isn't. Unfortunately, we've outlawed all the fun stuff as "cruel and unusual punishment".
http://outcampaign.org/
Yes you do, the 38 years quoted in the article is particularly inflammatory as its the maximum he could get for all of his charges back to back. He won't get the maximum on any convictions (people rarely do), and he almost certainly won't get back-to-back sentencing, his terms will be concurrent. If convicted, he will most likely get anything from a suspended sentence to a couple of years.