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

Zero Tolerance

[mentil]

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.

Harsh.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Harsh.

[JaredOfEuropa]

The fact that he used computers to do it shouldn't increase the punishment

I agree. But this is a bit more serious than sneakily messing with the grade book between classes. More like having the janitor called away from his office on some pretext, sneaking in there to steal his keys, duplicating them, then using the keys to break into the school at night and change the grade book.

Still, not something that warrants a felony charge. With kids, focus of the sentence should be on rehabilitation rather than retribution. How this this work with minors in the USA anyway, does a juvie conviction stay on one's permanent record?

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).

Lowering grades?

[b0s0z0ku]

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."

Re:Lowering grades?

[b0s0z0ku]

The US has a higher incarceration rate than most of the developed, democratic world, but doesn't have lower violent crime rates to show for it. The US system lacks a sense of proportion.

Re:Lowering grades?

[b0s0z0ku]

Considering a lot of people start being locked up for personal matters that shouldn't concern the state (like what substances they choose to put into their bodies), I don't think I am.

Re:Lowering grades?

[ShanghaiBill]

I think you're confusing cause and effect.

No he isn't. Not all US states went on prison construction sprees. Those that did and those that didn't saw similar changes in crime rates. The prisons did little to help.

Prisons help some by keeping criminals off the street, but they also hurt because they create hardened criminals with few other options, and they disrupt families and communities. If you want to prevent crime, there are smarter things to spend your budget on than mass incarceration, such as better education.

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:Lowering grades?

[SuricouRaven]

It's not recidivism. It's a returning customer.

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.

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:They should make them misdemeanors

[b0s0z0ku]

Equating all crimes (as you seem to be) is the real stupidity. Felonies should be reserved for major thefts and serious harm to others' health or lives. By making everything a felony, the American system has lost all sense of proportion.

Re:They should make them misdemeanors

[Solandri]

The stupid thing is he's probably going to face a harsher punishment than the people responsible for the Equifax leak. All he did was try to change his grades. Equifax put over a hundred million people's credit and finances at risk.

Though I have to say, if he'd put as much effort into studying as he did setting up this phishing attempt (create a website which mimics the official school site?), he probably wouldn't have needed to change his grades.

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:Serves them right

[lsllll]

"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"!

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:Before everybody gets too worked up about this.

[zippthorne]

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?

Appropriate Punishment

[Roger W Moore]

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.

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.

Re:Serves them right

[thegarbz]

I didn't do anything "evil" with it

So you only committed 13 felonies?