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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.
That's almost 5 days' worth of felonies. Too bad 'zero tolerance' replaced 'let the punishment fit the crime.'
If he's lucky, the FBI will hire him and get him a shorter/commuted sentence.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
A felony is a massive life-altering consequence that is not necessarily the most useful way to address or punish a problem. The kid's sixteen. Would you charge a kid with sixteen felonies for opening a teacher's grade book and turning an F into an A with an old-fashioned pen? The fact that he used computers to do it shouldn't increase the punishment.
If he just raised random people's grades (so as not to point only to himself), it might have slipped by un-noticed. But students who got lower-than-expected grades would likely complain, causing an investigation. Hoist by his own petard, so to speak.
Should we ruin his life with 14 felonies over it? Nope. He needs a slap in the hand and some direction, not serious jail time and a record. Unpaid community service conducting teacher training on cybersecurity and Internet hygiene would be about right.
But 'murkah and harsh "justice."
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.
But if anyone who's likely to be called to jury duty on the case is reading this, some advice:
nullify.
Nullify.
NULLIFY.
Not that it's likely to get that far in a juvie case, but still ... remember that it's always your right to judge the law as well as the case.
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.
Evidently he wasn't hacking to learn.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Uryjay Ullificationay"
lol. I had to look that up on Google and realized what it was when Google asked me if I meant "Jury Nullification"!
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
"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.
Keep in mind these are 14 felony *charges*, not convictions. Prosecutors always go for the maximum they can charge so defendants can plea-bargain down to something more reasonable. Although a court date is set, it will probably be settled in a plea bargain and never go to a jury trial. Given how it's the kid's first offense and the lesser gravity of the "crimes" (altering grades is less serious than stealing money, copyright infringement, or NSA documents), the actual convictions will probably be plea bargained down to misdemeanors and the kid will probably be slapped with a hefty fine (which his parents will be on the hook for, as he is a minor), do some non-trivial community service time, and have restrictions placed on his internet access for a period of time (maybe 1-2 years). Worst case: the prosecutor is an overzealous asshole and wants to make an example of the kid. If so, the poor kid's life is seriously f**ked.
Prosecutors always go for the maximum they can charge so ... it will probably be settled in a plea bargain and never go to a jury trial.
You don't think maybe there is a problem with the legal system when this is a thing? That prosecutors have a tool they can use to avoid having to prove their cases? That they not only have the will to do this, it is basically standard operating procedure at this point?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Should we ruin his life with 14 felonies over it? Nope.
I completely agree - this should be handled internally by the school. However, if parents are going to use the courts to stop their kids being punished by schools then it's not surprising that schools have ended up having to use the courts to punish students. Courts are not at all designed to cope with misbehaving schoolkids and the result is that either they get off scot-free or they end up with life-ruining consequences.
Nobody is arguing that he should not be punished it is the severity of the punishment that is in question. A badly behaved schoolkid changing a few internal school grades is not the sort of thing a court is designed to deal with. You cannot achieve justice in schools through the court system: either kids will get off without any punishment or they end up with extremely serious consequences. What is needed is serious, but not life-changing consequences so they have a chance to learn from their mistakes.
I bet that the teacher is not going to be at least reprimanded for being stupid enough to be phished by a kid.
This is why security doesn't work. Being stupid is not being punished.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
99% of teens age 16 are assholes sometimes. Punishing them for life would almost guarantee them to become assholes most of the time.
Bueller. Bueller. Bueller.
Mind you, he never got caught.
Have these law enforcers gone completely mad? They charged a fucking schoolboy with 14 "felonies" for cheating on his grades. That's an outrageous abuse of office. I say let the little boy off, and lock up the deranged & dangerous law enforcer who laid those preposterous charges.
I didn't do anything "evil" with it
So you only committed 13 felonies?
Believe it or not, engaging in fraud is actually illegal. No matter how dumb you think they are.
And if you just "slap on the wrist", there's little disincentive to do it.
I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.
Maybe we can make it go the other way, "Nerds will be nerds", and be done with it!
You don't think maybe there is a problem with the legal system when this is a thing?
Plea bargaining is not bad, it's the American mockery of it. Here in Norway a typical plea length is ~80% of what the prosecution will ask for at trial, which seem sufficient for the vast majority of cases where the evidence is compelling. It's not worth gambling on a 1% technicality, while if they're trying to bring a dubious case to trial the risk of the full 100% is not going to scare off the innocent. In the US it's more like we have this scrap of evidence of a misdemeanor, take this plea bargain for 3 months or we'll try to put you away for 30 years. There should be a law that told the jury what plea bargain the defendant got and refused, maybe the at-trial convictions would not be so crazy. Because the problem is juries are often willing to "upsold" to say maybe not 30 but 10 years where even that is ridiculous.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This probably didn't cause any more inconvenience than the average college prank. Things like reassembling a car in a library, moving a professor's office to another floor, turning the MIT dome into a giant breast, or putting a piece of dating software onto a campus email system (in the UNIX shell days, the software kept a list of male and female students and would send random "write" messages or "ytalk" requests between them). So it should be treated as such - clean the results up, and some detention, since it's high school, not college.
Maybe he can hack in and reduce it to 1 misdemeanor?
-Dave
These are charges. He committed crimes, maliciously, with these stolen credentials. Presumably 14 of them. Wait for the sentencing to see if they go to far.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.