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Top Student Charged With Fixing Grades For Cash
alphadogg writes "A Nevada student who gave the opening address at his high school graduation last year has been charged with breaking into his school district's computer system and bumping up his classmates' grades for a fee. Police say Tyler Coyner, 19, was the ringleader in a group of 13 students who have been charged with conspiracy, theft and computer intrusion in connection with the case. Last year, Coyner somehow obtained a password to the Pahrump Valley High School's grade system and, over the course of two semesters, offered to change grades in return for cash payments, police say."
So for anyone who has seen that film, doesn't this seem remarkably similar? (Aside from starting a nuclear war...)
You mean he forgot that his institution probably had a weighted grading scheme where honors and other high-level classes were scaled to a 5.0 GPA whereas regular classes were scaled to a 4.0 GPA? No, he seems to have had that pretty well down.
was the password on a piece of paper in the office and he just know where it was stored it?
"password", mmm, no. "123456" Oh, hey -- we're in!
Caveat Utilitor
doing it for free is not the same as doing it for cash.
If you do it for free maybe you get a F or get kicked out but for cash may mean doing some time.
his ROT-26 encryption!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We need to come down hard on miscreants like this. Sure, right now he's stealing passwords from the school office and changing grades, but soon that won't be enough for him, and before long he'll be wardialing military contractors with his IMSAI 8080 and acoustocoupler modem.
was it "pencil"?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
> "password", mmm, no. "123456"
Remind me to change the combination on my luggage.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I guess we'll know when defcon changes to something other then the current 5.
New things are always on the horizon
Sorry wrong thread. :-(
New things are always on the horizon
The best graduates have trouble with basic arithmetic and are functionally illiterate?
At best that is pure bull shit, but I am afraid that you may really think it is true.
Please post some evidence.
Not changing a password at least once in two semesters, i.e., a whole school year. Tsk tsk.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I'm sure Goldman Sachs and major banks are scrambling over themselves to offer him a fat six figure starting salary.
you had me at #!
Was he really the top student, or did he fix his own grades too?
MABASPLOOM!
Save Ferris
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
In the Pahrump Valley Times profile, Coyner says he dreamed of attending an Ivy league school like Harvard and that he wanted to become a hedge fund trader.
Wow. A lying, cheating, bastard dreams of being a hedge fund trader. I'm sure that the guild of hedge fund traders will bar him preemptively from joining them, thereby preventing everyone's pristine reputation as ethical and trustworthy human beings from being sullied by association.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Haven't you played Deus Ex? The password was probably left on the Bathroom floor, or behind a few stacked up boxes in the Gymnasium.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
"I didn't get a 'Pahrump' out of you."
"Pahrump!"
"You watch your ass."
That's what happened in my high school — the school IT people would store the administrator password on sticky notes. Inevitably one fell off in the hallway, and my friends and I found it, and decided to pull a few pranks.
The administration and IT people got really pissed and changed the password. Which, of course, we found a few days later sitting on a sticky note in the hall...
It's really more sad than funny, actually, because not only did the IT people use the same administrator password everywhere, our school actually served as the ISP/host for a lot of municipal services around our county, including the police department.
>>>Turn it up to 11
DEFCON goes from 5 (all clear) to 1 (nuclear extinction). Cmon. Haven't you ever watched Stargate or those old Cold war movies? ;-)
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
After college, he will probably get tapped by a rating agency right away. Standards & Poors, Fitch, whatever.
lucky brat. then he will be able to fix grades all he wants, and will be paid for and applauded for it.
Read radical news here
Or perhaps you forgot that some school systems use a 4 point scale to calculate GPA, while other systems use a 5 point scale. Guess which one his school belonged to.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, McKenzy etc are all at awe by the precocious ability shown by this young man. Mr Werobam Erica, spokesman for the Cleptolegit Institute, a think tank where finance managers of the top companies exchange ideas about how to rake in millions of dollars and amending the laws post-facto to make it legal, said that this man is CEO material and predicted great things in store for him.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>>>Turn it up to 11
DEFCON goes from 5 (all clear) to 1 (nuclear extinction). Cmon. Haven't you ever watched Stargate or those old Cold war movies? ;-)
That may have been a Spinal Tap reference. http://youtu.be/UeOXsA8sp_E
When a user complains about a sound password policy, this story is a good explanation of why it's really not just the admin's special way of annoying everyone.
Working...
And got a computer. How's that for being born under a bad sign?". Meanwhile across town..."...nine times......GRACE! GRACE!"
we ran a windows password cracker on a shared PC in high school and ended up with hundreds of account passwords, including the principal's. it was hannah, leading to much lulz -- WE'VE GOT HANNAH MR PRINCIPAL. +10 to anyone getting the reference.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I suppose all these questions only matter when you're going through the web-pages to modify the grades. If you had access to the database and could run SQL commands on them, then all these questions would be void. Passwords for databases don't get changed since it's assumed no-one but internal scripts use them.
On the other hand, the software that manages things like grades and such are big bloated turds that no-one wants to get their hands dirty with beside the minimum requirements. It could be just that nobody cared to analyze the logs until the anomalies just became too big. Just like you said, each procedure is a boring, tedious list of requirements that no-one wants to learn and follow and when things go wrong it's not obvious to anyone.
Leading to the next, if the guy hadn't gotten greedy and doing it for money, he would never have been caught. How many people out there change grades and are never caught? Grades are all hush hush and even if things get changed, nobody would really know.
So what? Those might explain why the system was able to be penetrated, but it does nothing to reduce the accountability of the student that made the changes.
This contrasts many eastern european schools where "honors" students come out knowing aprox 3,000 equations but don't have enough practical life skills to open a bank account or form an original thought.
Two things: first, the person you're replying to is obviously wrong. We have "graduates" with quite a few issues, but our best graduates are certainly not having problems with basic arithmetic. I have no idea why someone would get that idea.
Second...I'll take academic skills over "practical" ones anytime. Who the hell cares if I don't know how to open a bank account? If I didn't, I'd walk into a bank and ask someone who works there to help me out. There are plenty of people whose job is financial advising and planning, I'll gladly pay them. Division of labor: it's the new thing!
Not a direct answer to your questions, but based on the links on the lower-right of the school's homepage they're using Pearson PowerSchool, which has a teacher's gradebook module as well as several categories of central-administrative functions. I'd guess he shoulder-surfed, found written or guessed someone's password at some point, but as to whether he used the normal system UI or directly edited some back-end database, I wouldn't bet either way.
Based on other public information, last year's senior class was 203 students ... so almost 10% wanted to buy higher grades? No wonder he got caught...
but the grade system may just have 1 login that is used by more then 1 person or it's some system that does not have policy's.
Also schools some times still use lots of old software.
Did you just say American high schools teach practical life skills or how to open a bank account or form an original thought?
I have a friend who teaches freshman comp at U Arizona. Most of the freshmen do not know how to have abstract thoughts. You have to teach them.
Don't get me wrong--there are a LOT of very capable American high school students and graduates. But most of that isn't from stuff they learn in school. It's from parents (the number 1 factor in determining future education level is education level of parents) or reading or the net or friends or social organizations they're in or (to some very limited degree) enrichment programs, perhaps offered by local colleges.
I know someone else who taught in NY at a school where the kids beat up a cop in front of the school, so the cops came in and harassed the students for a week. In an unrelated incident he had to pull a student physically off a female teacher's leg. Some schools do teach a lot... but even the good ones, for the most part, do not teach you how to open a bank account or form an original thought. And the bad ones are struggling to teach reading.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Some schools don't even have IT staff or it's tacked on to someone job and is not done full time.
Honestly, it's not that hard. If you're changing them by hand on more than a few machines then you're doing it wrong.
WarGames 1983
It doesn't matter under the law. If you enter my house and remove my property from it, it's irrelevant that you found the key under the mat - you're still guilty of breaking and entering and of theft.
(And no, my key isn't under the mat, I'm smarter than that. A fellow geocacher might find it, but not an ordinary burglar.)
Even basic things, like fairly well established 'net conventions have not penetrated very far. For example, many local Gov. officials send all caps emails (but then so does a fairly large % of the local populace).
Nevada in general, and Pahrump in particular, are among the nations lowest ranked in education. The Nevada educational systems are in desperate need of overhaul.
It is also worth noting that when arrested in his University of Nevada, Reno dorm, he had a stolen TV and equipment for making counterfeit drivers' licenses.
Here's a link to the local paper, with pictures and local comments; http://pvtimes.com/news/grade-change-scandal-rocks-pvhs/
A quote from the comments by "3rd year Engineering Student":
I think "3rd year Engineering Student" may need to check some definitions himself... but the pathetic part is that no one questions his expertise, or the definitions he offers.
Pahrump is a nice place in many ways, but it's also a lot like stepping back in time in many ways. The population is about 35,000, and it's about 50 miles from Las Vegas.
GOD is not a good password.
Two things: first, the person you're replying to is obviously wrong. We have "graduates" with quite a few issues, but our best graduates are certainly not having problems with basic arithmetic. I have no idea why someone would get that idea.
They are getting that idea because there are an unacceptable level of students "graduating" who's skill level is well below par. If everyone get's the same elephant stamp coming out of an institution, it's hard to judge from a set of "qualifications" who is talented, and who simply drank beer for a few years.
Second...I'll take academic skills over "practical" ones anytime. Who the hell cares if I don't know how to open a bank account? If I didn't, I'd walk into a bank and ask someone who works there to help me out. There are plenty of people whose job is financial advising and planning, I'll gladly pay them. Division of labor: it's the new thing!
Know everything about something, but something about everything. If you don't have a clue about a topic, how do you ensure the "expert" you delegate to has talent, and isn't just a drip under pressure?
I would certainly hire an expert to provide me with an opinion on which investments are best, how to manage risk, which loan instrument would be suitable to purchase a house for either investment or personal purposes. But opening a bank account? Surely you must have the level of skill to do this yourself to adequately function in society.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
This happened at my high school years ago (aside from the grade selling). The student in question put keyloggers on a number of PC's in one lab trying to get a friend's Ragnarok Online password, but instead got the system admin login info. He was caught when his calculus teacher went to change the grade of one of her other students from the semester before and discovered his D- became a straight C.
Indeed, I had a 4.25 GPA on a 4.0 scale way back in high school. I took a bunch of honours classes (chemistry, physics, calculus, english, US history) to get the extra grade points.
Well to be fair if the subject the GP was talking about went to what we in the south call a "football school"? Then yeah it is possible to graduate HS with lousy math skills, and if they were on the team probably illiterate to boot. How would I know? Well I managed to graduate with honors and never actually walked into a class.
How did I do that? Well I got to spend my Junior HS years being tutored thanks to eating pavement at 65MPH plus in a bike wreck, but the tutors wanted me to try to do the last two years with a most likely shortened schedule (ended up 3 day on, 2 day off with 1 day of tutoring) just so I "wouldn't feel isolated" and get to know my fellow students. Now I personally didn't care because my mom had and still has one of the best Sci-Fi collections in the area, I was quite happy with Asimov and Heinlein thanks anyway.
So the first day first class is PE and the teacher says "Anyone not ready to run 20 laps can just get out of my class!" so I left, and took about 1/3rd the class with me. Apparently he had been using that line for awhile and nobody had called him on it, but I just looked at it logically and did what I was told and the others said "Hey he's leaving~we'll follow him!" so after the VP gave the moron a "Don't tell them they can leave!" speech he stuck me and the others in study hall, which was run by the head football coach.
He takes one look at the cover of my "Best Sci-Fi authors of 1976" paperback and thinks I must be hiding girlie mags. He calls me to the front and when he finds it not only doesn't have a hidden girlie mag, but I could sit there and discuss the grandfather paradox and whether time was fixed or changeable he said "How would you like get to straight As and never go to class?" which considering what I had seen so far sounded good to me.
So he takes my class schedule and takes me into each teacher's class on the list and informs them I'll be on "special projects" and they should just give me an A, I of course being a smartass said "Why not an A+?" but got told not to push it. He then sat me up in my very own classroom! where I got to sit and enjoy my books and when any footballer was in "study hall" they were actually in my class being taught how to do basics like spell "flower" and "Stood" and do checkbook math so they could pass eligibility requirements. I swear the first day I was getting "Flower...Floer" and "stood...stuud"
I was quite happy for those last two years, I got my own classroom, I got to sit on the bench during practices and teach the players not in the field, and I'm quite happy to say not a single player I taught was benched for lack of eligibility. Now of course I was lucky, in that I liked to learn new things and that while others got "Horton hears a who" I got stories of worlds with three suns and rivers that looked like liquid mercury which fired up my imagination, but if someone went to a football school and fell through the cracks, or if they had to keep dumbing down so the players could play? Yep I could see you graduating some pretty sad kids.
As for TFA sounds like capitalism 101 to me. Kinda hard to bitch at the kid when you see CEOs cooking the books all over the place. I say you go kid, I'm sure you make a great CxO someday.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
At least not in my opinion. My buddy did the same thing when we were in high school about 6 or 7 years ago. Booted up in Linux, copied the SAM file over, cracked it at home. Did it a few times until we found one that the administrator account had logged into. He was never caught until the end of the year because we decided to pull a prank and change the standard wallpaper for all the student accounts to this http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/7629/gib.png. He was caught because as it turns out, the system was setup to capture screenshots of anyone logged in every 10 seconds, combined with the fact that he signed in to the library to use the computer, they were able to catch him. I don't think they ever found out about changing some grades, but I'm not sure about that.
Whoosh...
Pencil was the password Matthew Broderick's character used to break into his school's computer system in the movie Wargames.
Putting moderation advice in your
So how many fail points do I pick up for googling the phrase and still not getting it?
We were given an assignment to spend 45 minutes of (self-)learning about computer security.
I looked at WinNT security, then managed to change the Local Admin account's password, and finally walked down to IT to ask them to reset it (never figured out the original passwork). Was given a lecture about how this was reason for expelling me, which I turned around to a lecture on having proper security, and then reminded them that I was one of their best students.
Back in class we had to recount our 45 minutes for the rest of the class - teacher ended up with a completely blank look on his face after I told the class what I had learnt.
'nuff said ;-)
I don't see the issue here. We raise our children to believe that money is the most important thing in the world, and they act accrdingly. Why on earth would that surprise anyone?
The hedge fund thing just highlights the point.
Sure they would, they'd charge him with larceny, trespassing, etc.
In my day we had token-ring IBM machines all hooked into a netware setup. For those of you who don't know, there's a really serious exploit possible by faking out netware when running over token ring–something that would give you full admin privileges. I believe the packet interception tool was called Pandora, but it's been a long time.
Anyway, one could just go to Barnes and Noble, buy a book about security exploits, and be in business. I never went that far, but there was someone who posted some nasty things about child porn on the admin servers. I'm not sure if they actually used the token-ring method to get the password, but the idea behind what 4chan's /b/ is today was on the root writable part of the netware server at my school.
I found the problem and told the IT admin, who then asked me what the hell I was doing looking around at his filesystem. I told him it was world readable and that he had a bigger problem that he needed to deal with before he went after me. I'm not sure they ever found out who did it. They never bothered me about it after I told them.
That is in addition to the fact that it seems to be remained the same "over the course of two semesters"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Well, he charged as much as someone who knew what he was doing!
They are getting that idea because there are an unacceptable level of students "graduating" who's skill level is well below par. If everyone get's the same elephant stamp coming out of an institution, it's hard to judge from a set of "qualifications" who is talented, and who simply drank beer for a few years.
Irony and grammar. BFF.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I wonder if this is one of those schools that gives its students laptops? There are schools in the area who have a wireless access point in almost every classroom. I had a friend who would bring his own laptop in, knock out the access point (not entirely sure how), and just man in the middle everyone in the room when they tried to reconnect to the router. Bam, every single kids password, including any teachers/administrator who also tried to reconnect. He got kicked out of the first school for changing grades (A to F will do that). But at the second school he never got caught, just change. Technology is great, but these schools don't do a very good job teaching their students how to use it safely.
is getting caught
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
You know, 25 years ago I managed to get a hold of a teacher's grade book. I modified my mark on one test, just because I was annoyed at having an overall average under 90%.
(We didn't have A or C grades, nor GPA... just a mean average of all tests in the year. 85% right, 97% right, etc)
Funny thing is, first -- he did not notice until a friend of mine kept saying 'doesn't that 8 look weird?' to the teacher. ;) It was all good fun, in that, we could not believe he had not noticed.
However, the downside was -- woha, the mark I changed were zeroed out. He felt that was punishment enough, in that, I had moved from 87% to 83% in terms of my new average.
How the *hell* does any of this result in criminal charges. My *god*, these are *kids*. Criminal charges?! Teenagers do *stupid* things. They do them on the spur of the moment. Punishment is required so one can learn that there are repercussions, but come on!
Suspend them for a week, if you must. Force them to donate the money to charity, or some such. Zero out all the grades they changed, if you must.
Call the police?! What is *wrong* with people?!
Do you mean that the horribly inefficient school system that relies on grades instead of actual knowledge makes it desirable to cheat for higher grades? Really!? What a surprise!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Hi MR AC! As someone from the other side of the world allow me to elucidate. A "football school" is where a lot of the extra cash and support comes from alumni supporting the team, which means sucky team? Sucky money. Here you will often see schools where the PCs are nearly a decade old but the gym will beat most college athletic depts. While the regular students get a cookie cutter "another brick in the wall" education, the footballers almost from the time they first step on a field are treated as Gods among men.
I can see why so many NFL players end up convicts, they have been giving the footballer treatment almost since grade school. Any crime short of mounting a head on their car is quietly swept under the rug, nobody cares what they do as long as they continue to rack up the yardage. They get money, pussy, better treatment than anyone else, hell to a kid it is like being a rock star!
But sadly the schools have been hit with so many "You're discriminating against my little thug!" lawsuits that they pretty much don't toss anyone for just not giving a shit, so you have overcrowded classes and overworked teachers, which is where "special projects" comes in. Now to be fair frankly I believe I got a better education simply diving into that which interested me than the cookie cutter bullshit they were pushing, and I did try my best with the footballers.
But when you have been coddled since 5th grade and told "don't worry about it, you just concentrate on the game" for years frankly the best tutors in the world ain't gonna help, but at least I did make sure they had practical skills like how to deal with a checkbook or balance their money.
So yeah football schools just aren't gonna give you much anyway. Funny part is when I had to take a remedial algebra class to get a degree the corp wanted (always hated algebra so never bothered) and when the teacher who was from NYC heard my story he too was appalled, but a girl in the class popped up "You too? I did the same job at my school!" and all I had to say was "Go Lions!" and she said "Go Panthers!" and we instantly knew all about each others location and history thanks to our teams playing each other. Pretty much life at a football school is all about the game, everything else? meh.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Come on, at least give 'em partial credit for getting "it's" right.
I'm paraphrasing Space Balls. You mod me down for that? What, are you pissed because somebody made a movie making fun of Star Wars? God, you guys live up to my signature and that's just sad.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
When I was in high school I got a summer job with the district IT department installing computers.
Amusingly, the district IT admins decided to add my account to the domain administrators AD group (which gave us full access to every server in the district, including the ones with the grade databases). They also gave us the GGM key (which opened every lock in the district) and a sheet with the alarm codes to every school.
We didn't do anything, but that's a surprising amount of trust to place in a 16-year-old student with zero work experience. Especially considering that their total knowledge of me came from a 30 minute job interview.
Someone should tell them that not every computer NEEDS to be attached to a network all the time.
Hedge fund traders have never been accused of being ethical or trustworthy except by their defense attorneys.
:)
Sentence is entirely valid and works just fine. Your comment is just invalid
Why would you go to an Ivy League school to become a salesman who gambles for a living. Frankly, I think the biggest problem with professional gamblers like hedge fund traders and other financial traders in general is that instead of a cheap trading license (which I actually got when I was 19 after 1.5 weeks of studying part time, never used it, I don't approve of gambling), traders should be required to have a degree from a university with a specialization on statistics and probabilities.
So far as I can tell, the only justifiable reason to get an Ivy League education when becoming a 3rd party professional gambler is to find people to swindle while you drink and party at school.
Respect and trust is usually reciprocal and what is given is usually returned. Likewise, if you treat someone like a thief, they will steal from you.
Cheap storage VM.