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

They should make them misdemeanors

[ITRambo]

The fools that charge the kid with felonies risk putting a talented hacker onto a road to a life of crime by introducing him to real felony criminals in prison, if it went that far. While his hacks were easily reversible, they should show some respect for his skill at exposing the ignorance of this teachers, and put him on a good path and not possibly in prison, by forcing him to teach teachers how to avoid the folly that they fell for. This is the epitome of a victimless crime.

Re:Serves them right

[Rei]

No kidding. 14 felonies for this? As a teenager, I too phished my teacher (and much of my class) successfully for their passwords by making a mock DOS prompt that mimicked basic commands and the login program. To be fair, I didn't do anything "evil" with it - as part of my final project, I actually encoded the teacher's username and password into stereogram with a generator that I wrote ;) She found it amusing. I'm sure she wouldn't have found it so amusing if I had been in there changing grades or whatnot. But 14 felones for a teenager acting up is just insane.

I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.