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Student Expelled After Using Hardware Keylogger to Hack School, Change Grades (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Kansas University (KU) officials have expelled a student for installing a hardware keylogger and using the data acquired from the device to hack into the school's grading system and chang his grades. KU did not release the student's name to the public, but they said the keystroke logging device had been installed on one of the computers in its lecture halls. The student used data collected from the device to change F grades into A grades. Professors said the incident would not have been noticed if the student didn't get greedy about modifications. The hardware device the student used was a run-of-the-mill hardware keylogger that anyone can buy on Amazon or eBay for prices as low as $20. Speaking to local media, various KU professors said they hope not to see any copycats in the near future.
I went to college in the late 1980's
I was going for a CS degree but had to take electives. One elective class I took was chemistry. To make a long story short, I was going to school in the day and had a full time job in the evening. I let the chemistry class slide as I concentrated on programming classes.
At the end of the semester 50% of the grade for the chemistry class was based off of the final exam which was to be taken on the schools computer in the computer lab, where I spent most of my weekends anyway. The test was on Commodore 64's.
The test was 200 multiple choice questions and timed for only 2 hours. I fumbled around on the first 50 question for the first hour. Knowing I would never complete the test in time, I decided to cheat. I knew the break sequence of the commodore and set about to change the basic program. Well, in commodores you could lock the execution memory from any change.
So, I found where the memory location was for the number correct and the number of the next question. I changed the memory location for number correct to 198 and the number of the next question to 200. I hung out reading my chemistry notes for the next 50 minutes and then typed in "run" and pressed enter.
A screen popped up saying that I had completed the test in 1 hour and 50 some odd minutes with 198 correct out of 200.
I passed the class with a 70.
Armatures these days....
Nathan
I was right there with you until this part:
Well, in commodores you could lock the execution memory from any change.
Plausibility went rapidly downhill from there.
You'd be how easy it can be to get a teacher's password.
Back when I lived in the US and was in high school, the school offered an introductory course to programming in Basic. I already knew how to program, so I spent the course primarily either writing games or espionage tools ;) One of my favourite was a program that mimicked the DOS prompt (including most common commands), waited for them to run what they thought was the logon program, wrote out the username and password to a file, reported that the password was wrong, logged out of my account and put them back in the real DOS shell - wherein they'd log in normally and everything was fine. I'd usually leave it running on a couple random classroom computers whenever I left. By the end of the year, not only did I have most student passwords, but the password of my teacher and a different one.
Did I use it to change assignments? Alter grades? Vandalize the network? No no no, of course not. Rather, my final project was an overly elaborate demo, which had many different scenes (things like me walking around shooting lightning bolts and other similar nonsense). One scene was a stereogram generator. The hidden image in the stereogram? The teacher's username and password ;)
Thankfully she found it amusing rather than disciplining me ;) I got a perfect score. Looking back at it, I could imagine a teacher with a lesser sense of humor having me suspended or even calling the police.
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!
What is going on here? He was only expelled? A college student?!
Didn't we have a middle school student charged with a felony for changing a desktop wallpaper a couple years ago?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
A college student pays $$$$$ for education and loses that for doing something he ought to have known better than do and was planned out ahead of time.
A highschool student gets a felony destroying many of their job prospects for their entire life for a prank.
How is this remotely fair? It's not even !@#$%^& consistent!
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!