California High Schooler Changes Grades After Phishing Teachers, Gets 14 Felonies for His Efforts (gizmodo.com)

Police in Concord, California arrested a teenager earlier this week and charged him 14 felony counts after discovering the high schooler launched a phishing campaign directed at teachers in order to steal their passwords and change grades. From a report: The 16-year-old student, whose name was not released because he's a minor, was arrested Wednesday following an investigation launched by local law enforcement, with assistance from a Contra Costa County task force and the US Secret Service, KTVU reported. Reports of the hack first started to trickle into police two weeks ago, when teachers in the Mount Diablo Unified School District started receiving suspicious emails in their inbox. As it turns out, they were part of a phishing attempt launched by the student. The email messages contained a link that sent the recipients to a fake website constructed by the student to look like the school's portal. If a teacher clicked on the link, they were directed to the site that would prompt them to enter their username and password. The site would record any information entered, allowing the student to hijack the teacher's account.

Comments

Re: Serves them right

[ShanghaiBill]

"Mount Diablo Unified School District"

He was clearly going through hell.

Completely off topic trivia: From the summit of Mt Diablo (Devil's Peak) in Concord CA, you can see more of the earth's surface than anyplace else on earth with the sole exception of the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro. Like Kilimanjaro, Mt Diablo is an isolated peak, surrounded by vast flat surfaces (California's Central Valley to the East, and San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean to the West). You can see roughly 80,000 sq miles on a clear day.

Re:Harsh.

[fafalone]

At 16, he'll probably be charged as a minor depending on the state and exact offense (more serious crimes would definitely get someone tried as an adult at 16 tho). As long as he's charged as a minor, it's not on his 'permanent record' in the sense it's sealed, so he doesn't have to say (and court checks won't show) that he's a convicted felon after he turns 18 (or 21 in some cases).

Re:Lowering grades?

[Ly4]

An opinion piece from the WSJ isn't exactly a useful citation. It's paywalled - do they ever get around to comparing the US to other countries or do they just whine about the term 'mass incarceration'?

It's not difficult to find articles and studies that contradict the whole 'incarceration reduced crime' theory. This one includes this bit:

Fortunately, there is a real-time experiment underway. For many reasons, including straitened budgets and a desire to diminish prison populations, many states have started to cut back on imprisonment. What happened? Interestingly, and encouragingly, crime did not explode. In fact, it dropped. In the last decade, 14 states saw declines in both incarceration and crime. New York reduced imprisonment by 26 percent, while seeing a 28 percent reduction in crime. Imprisonment and crime both decreased by more than 15 percent in California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Texas.