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

In my day...

[Kaenneth]

I used a keylogger entered into the machine with physically blocked ports via crashing the teacher app to DOS by entering a password longer than 255 characters then using "COPY CON: KL.COM" and ALT-numpad entered machine code from my notebook to copy the next characters typed (which would be the next teachers password) to high memory for me to retrieve later.

I only used it to lower bullies grades, not boost my own.

Re:Lowering grades?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sealed is a myth really. When I was under 18 I ran afoul of the legal system, well let's just say a few times, and though I only had 1 thing go on my permanent record and it was really minor, The others were all classified as HBO [Handled by Officer] which means I wasn't even charged. Just got bitched out by the cops and that was that. Or so I thought until I joined the Navy, On my enlistment forms I reported everything I remembered and then a few weeks later I got a phone call from the Navy bitching me out like crazy saying things like falsifying my info was punishable by jail and blah blah blah up to 100k in fines blah blah blah. They then instructed me to be in their office the next day to resolve this. It was a 4+ hour drive and I was shitting bricks the whole way there,

I get there and after a few hours was led to an interrogation room and after what seemed like weeks an officer what not came in and started reading me my rights,

I was like whoa, whoa, whoa, WTF are you talking about. I was completely honest with my info. To which he tossed a few things on the table showing the HBO incidents and said then what are these?
I was like, 1st off what the hell does HBO mean [that is where I learned what Handled by Officer meant] and I was like DUDE the cops bitched me out and told me to go home how was that even on my record?. He was like, EVERYTHING is on your record. Then I was like, but what happened to when I turned 18 everything was expunged, and that was when he said NOTHING is "sealed" and nothing is ever removed from your record.

That day I leaned a LOT and was pretty scared and then he was like, since this was really minor shit and he could tell I didn't do it on purpose that he was going to drop the matter and a few months later I was in boot camp.

Still pretty scary to be put through that when you're 18. [this was in 1982 so things might be different now] But I still remember it like it was yesterday.

Re: Harsh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I did something along those exact same lines but for unfettered access to the computer lab. I got caught and my principal took pity on me and allowed me to take a Commodore 64 home on weekends and drafted me a specific note allowing me computer time anytime my class work was complete.

No cops called..

Oh the memories ...