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

Posted by msmash on from the oops dept.

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.

5 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. They should make them misdemeanors by ITRambo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re: Serves them right by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

  3. Re:Lowering grades? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  4. Re:Serves them right by Rei · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
  5. Re:Serves them right by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Funny

    I didn't do anything "evil" with it

    So you only committed 13 felonies?