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Tufts Expelled a Student For Grade Hacking. She Claims Innocence (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it. A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.' That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her becoming a veterinarian behind. Filler, 24, was accused of an elaborate months-long scheme involving stealing and using university logins to break into the student records system, view answers, and alter her own and other students' grades.
The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.
There's just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she's accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others. Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.
The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.
There's just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she's accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others. Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.
Well, they got all that money in fees. No motivation to investigate too closely on the university's part.
Transfer your credits and finish up the rest of your classes elsewhere, stop whining!
News for nerds? Stuff that matters?
Some student either cheated or not.
News for nerds? Stuff that matters?
Hire a lawyer and sue the fuck out the school.
"Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate." - Or... she hired a 3rd party to hack on her behalf, which still benefited her and thus was traceable to her?
The fact that she apparently personally didn't do the actual keystrokes doesn't make her completely innocent of the charges automatically, that's ridiculous. Tufts either has more evidence they aren't sharing publicly (very likely),
or she's got a very winnable lawsuit should she invest in proving her innocence and righting their wrongful accusation.
or she had someone else do it for her
None of that evidence proves that she didn't get a friend to hack into the system, look at the answers, and change her grades for her. Note that other students' grades were also changed; there was likely a "psst, pay me $500 and I'll give you better grades" type of scheme going on here.
If it's her first cheating offense, her completion of the courses in question should be vacated and she should just be forced to redo them. Zero tolerance policies of expulsion on first offense go against the point of education.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
In many cases security at an academic institute is a springboard to private as well as a wasteland of people without talent. On the other hand, a smart hacker would also find ways of altering access logs or create an alibi.
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It can be spoofed. Just maybe someone on the same subnet is to blame using netcat or wireshark to read the ARP traffic, figure out who it was, then use them as the fall guy. If she was away, maybe they could detect the absence of the real computer, build a timetable of active hours, and hack outside of those hours while her real system wasn't in use.
Hmmm. She really should insist on taking a comprehensive test at this point and proving herself. She has a 3.9 on the Masters and 3.5 on the Doctorate. While Tufts is not that top notch, it certainly is not a fluff school either. Simple testing should prove what she knows/does not know.
As it is, if somebody really knows how to crack, then they would purposely change their mac (easy enough to do). I would be curious about her relationship to the other grades that changed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Unless she has some amazing technical prowess (I only skimmed the article) I find it hard to believe an amateur could have pulled this off. It seems like the real hacker(s) tried to clear their tracks but didn't fully remove the trojan(s).
If she actually is some super l33t h4x0r then she likely would have used another device, multiple devices, etc.
I wonder what will happen if/when "someone else" does some grade "hacking."
The article is making it sound sad that she only had 4 months left on her degree. That probably caused Tufts to have to act sooner. Expelling her is probably significantly easier than revoking her degree if issued. If she was a first year, they probably could have taken more time.
But now, if she is later exonerated, they can let her back in for her last set of classes a year late.
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"Date stamps are easy to edit," said Knoll. "In fact, the photos you shared with me clearly include an 'edit' button in the upper corner for this exact purpose," she wrote, referring to the iPhone software's native photo editing feature. "Why wait until after you'd been informed that you were going to be expelled to show me months' old photos?" she said.
Why show the photos any earlier? It sounds like she didn't know she would be expelled until she was accused of this hacking. What did this genius expect? That Filler would just walk up randomly to people to share a photo of her on a weekend trip? I mean, would that not be MORE suspicious? "Excuse me, just in case you might in the future accuse me of hacking the university computers last weekend I thought I'd show photographic evidence I was out of town."
I thought these people worked at a school.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This sounds more like a IT guy that was covering his tracks after someone realized that grades were getting changed.
Nobody who is innocent has an alibi ready to go. Real people in the real world don't have documentation putting them elsewhere most of the time because they don't expect to need it. People who have that documentation ready to go, especially for a large number of incidents, made sure they'd have it to prove their innocence which means they aren't innocent at all.
My fave part: "“I thought due process was going to be followed,” said Filler, in a call. “I thought it was innocent until proven guilty until I was told ‘you’re guilty unless you can prove it.'”"
Really? I'm pretty sure the last few years has shown for universities it is "guilty until sentenced - maybe we'll revisit the evidence in a year or two,after your life is ruined".
Those two words do not go gogether. I used to work for Tufts, less than 10 years ago. It's one of the places where people who get fired from MIT or Harvard go to lay low for a few years, to stay out of trouble and try to let people forget why they fired these people. (I needed work to support a sick daughter and suicidal depressed wife who'd already ruined my career.)
Their security suffers from a problem common to academic institutions: segmented groups who, by policy, refuse to share information or collaborate with each other. The result is that a moderately intelligent person who's paid attention can steal accounts and passwords, which they still transmit to people by plain text email, I don't know if they've updated their "laptop tracking". I can easily believe that a cracker, probably somebody from the Student Information Processinb Board at MIT trying to impress someone of their preferred gender over at Tufts, showed them how to waltz through the security systems, and rootkit their abuses through a selected student's laptop.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/matriculate - It means to enroll. Your usage of it "trust them with further matriculation" is odd. She's the one matriculating, and they're the ones who don't trust her.
Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student ...
This is why tertiary institutions shouldn't be allowed to act as the police. I realize, in this case, that much of the behaviour relates to academic integrity but the case should have been referred to the FBI.
Also, she should sue for defamation and loss of income.
If Tufts can't do better at explaining how she did it with all the alleged holes in their story they'll do some damage to their reputation among prospective students, and not just for the vet school.
You're not involved, dummy. Of course YOU haven't seen the evidence lol! Why are you seeming to take a position either way? Why do you think it's important that you see the evidence, or should be involved whatsoever?
we need bankruptcy for student loans and then the banks will go to bat for the students.
grand larceny for taking the cash needs to go court
different country may let her not pay back loans or little recorce or bankruptcy!!!!
Since she is a convicted cheater and lacks any sense of honesty in the eyes of the public, it would be easy for any criminal to violate her and impugn any testimony that she might give in court. If you want to commit a crime against someone, she is an easy mark.
"Struggling for answers and convinced her MacBook Air — the source of the alleged hacks — was itself compromised, she paid for someone through freelance marketplace Fiverr to scan her computer. Within minutes, several malicious files were found...
Filler took her computer to an Apple Store, claiming the “mouse was acting on its own and the green light for the camera started turning on,” she said. The support staff backed up her files but wiped her computer, along with any evidence of malicious software beyond a handful of screenshots she took as part of the dossier of evidence she submitted in her appeal."
The computer is evidence, who knows what would have been discovered had she let others analyse it. So she let her own 'evidence' get wiped out just after getting the screenshots she needed? That's awfully suspicious - and convenient for covering own's tracks.
Perhaps. Not sure how that works.
In my younger years, I could have pulled that off. Now that life matters, you never really know how crafty someone might be.
"If she files a suit or not is the key to finding out what actually happened." = You can try all over again if you like, but you have yet to refute the point you tried to.
Have at it.
Sue them. Get reinstated. Graduate. Win some money from them. She will come out ahead.
A truly worthless sentence.
That's 100% horseshit. Law enforcement being notified or not is not stated either way. You're inventing the omission as if that proves something about the University's credibility. It doesn't. You're fabricating.
"The media" also is a single article. Boy are you silly.
The fact her grades were changed (along with others) is evidence. Her laptop *was* used for some of this hacking, even she is not denying this.
I honestly don't know to believe her or not; lots of the alibi material also could be rigged.
At the very least there should be an investigation that would let her return if they find someone else did it. But to say there is no evidence, is really going too far the other way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nope. That's not a solution to the question of whether or not she cheated. Sorry, that's very dumb. You can be sure she'll be tested at the next university she attends. The question of whether or not she cheated is only provable in court.
A passing test months after the fact will not prove anything at all.
You just post constant fluffy nonsense to push all your lies off the first page of your post history.
Dig a little deeper and they are all still there.
Canada may save her form having to payup or at least have an easier time of getting out of it / under the law.
Easier bankruptcy and lower max Garnishments %
http://canadastudentdebt.ca/cs...
With IP6 your IPS controls you local sub net range unless you use nat. and with an laptop that goes from hot-spot to hot-spot will pick up different ip's at each one.
boycott going to college.
Easier said than done. Not going to college will by extension mean not being able to go to medical school, engineering school, and eliminate oneself from many occupations which require post-baccalaureate degrees.
With the Internet nowadays, you can learn about ANYTHING you want, for free.
No you can't. Its littered with paywalls, required texts, and even online college lectures aren't available for all the courses required to graduate.
There's a difference between saying "debt slavery for multiple decades does not make college a worthwhile endeavor" and saying "college is a waste of time (although for some people, it can be)".
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
She was studying at vet school. Nobody is going to let you be a vet without a degree, at least in most developed countries.
The university's side is not told here. The university will not reveal information to TechCrunch. So all we have here is the expelled student's version of events. It would be very strange indeed if it didn't suggest her innocence when she's the only person telling the story.
He has lots to say on just about every topic. It's a useful tactic to hide his constant lies about the climate.
"See look, I'm not just lying about China all the time. I also post bland things that everyone agrees with, in order to get modded up occasionally. And space out the lies a bit.
Now if you look at my history, there are only lies on every second page, instead of every second post."
It's just his attempt to hide in plain sight and blend in with everyone else.
Her insinuation that she was called into an ethics and grievance meeting of eight senior academics without advance notification doesn't pass the smell test.
Agreed. Where I work the discipline process is well scripted and students are given multiple opportunities to explain the evidence against them all with advance notice. Also, her claim that she is "guilty until proven innocent" is also false.
There is a preponderance of evidence apparently proving that she is guilty so yes, she does need to explain how this evidence does not imply that she is guilty. The most serious evidence is that her grades were improved using her laptop. It is possible that her laptop was hacked but then why would a random hacker improve her grades?
Finally, the letter indicating that the hospital records of her rounds do not match the one she provided also raises some serious doubts about her alibis. It seems likely that there is more to her account than meets the eye, either that or there is some tech-savvy individual who seriously has it in for her which would suggest that she probably knows them.
She turned me into a newt!
Maybe she was framed. You gotta admit it would be a great way to get rid of her.
Yes, it would take a pretty motivated person to do something like this, but I've known people who wouldn't be above this kind of behavior if they had the skills to pull it off.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Adults are talking.
The school declared her guilty. They have whatever evidence they have, the decision is theirs to make. They expelled her. That's guilty. She has yet to fight it, the article changes nothing. You're flapping like a fish in air.
She either takes them to court somehow to prove her claim, or she's left "as guilty" in reality by the decision and in the court of public opinion, this one article aside.
As of right now she's considered guilty by the school, the only decision maker involved to date.
Try and read all that and see if you can't cry yourself to sleep anyway. You're willfully dumb, we know.
You're a liar Sjames, it says nothing of the sort. You're simply retarded by choice.
"It's never twins." - Sherlock
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Lets see the evidence. Someone from IT may have a tool to intercept passwords (trivial to make one). So they have access to the librarian's password, the others' who can change grades. And also the studens password. What if the student uses the same password for the macbook, as for the university systems? The person from IT could install one of the trojans on the macbook (with the password), and that doesn't need automatic startup. Just ssh into the machine and start it manually, then use it as a proxy for framing purposes. The IT provided the IP addresses as well.
Which is more plausible? A student who want to heal pets hacks into a system to modify others' grades (so the notice is inevitable)? Or an IT guy having a crush on her wants some harm in exchange the girl didn't notice him?
You can learn some things for free. Others, like being a veterinarian? No only is there a significant amount of hands-on experience, but you also have to know whether you are physiologically capable of working with hurt animals.
Speaking for myself... in the Army, I was once attached to Engineering Battalion for a while. After an industrial accident (80s, Communist country) I had to help in containing and suppressing a serious fire, and getting some hurt people to a field hospital (to this day I suspect it was a field hospital only because they wanted to keep the extent of the casualties secret)
Guess what. I was fine fighting the fires, I was fine looking at cremated bodies and smelling cooked human, and I was fine carrying and driving badly hurt people. But when they asked me to help during cleaning the wounds, by the second patient, the nurse told me to get lost before I puked on his patients. I went away, I sat down, and I must have passed out, because I lost a quarter hour.
You do not want to waste months studying, and then realize that you lose your composure working deep in someone or something's body. I also I doubt you can practice medicine, even veterinary medicine without a degree.
-----------
Also, speaking as someone who in College has busted cheaters and got them expelled: cheaters often work in groups. We once caught someone who had made his girlfriend attend an early exam, take her copy of the final out, and give it to him, so he would have an advantage for the later exam that used the same questions.
The girl was good looking enough so that we, the TAs, noticed that we had not seen her before, wondered whose section she was in, and counted the exams. Three people got expelled - the cheater, his girlfriend, and the friend who worked on the quiz. Yes, they were stupid enough to try to turn the copy she had taken from the first exam... not realizing that every quiz had its unique binary id on each page, spelled with dots and spaces.
So my guess?
If the university is secure enough to kick her out her without fearing a lawsuit, they figured out that someone was doing it for her, which is why she has such solid alibis, and she refused to rat him out. These things are not handled lightly.
No good deed goes unpunished...
doesn't pass smell test - why did someone who is making good grades anyway need to hack to change grades? we're not getting 75+% of the story
Tufts vet school tuition is $51k and it takes 4 years for a DVM, so thatâ(TM)s $204k in tuition with no degree to show for it. Yikes!
'You're guilty unless you can prove it'. No, see, Kavanaugh, was guilty - without proof - until he could prove otherwise. In this case, she actually has a long list of proof against her, and is deemed guilty unless she can find a way to invalidate the proofs the university has against her.
I'd like her to sue Tufts, and I'd donate $50 towards that.
Privacy begins with
Worked in the physical therapy department of an acute care hospital for a while. Every summer we'd get a few folks volunteering to get their hours in to apply to go to PT school (easier to get into med school - similar pre-reqs, far fewer seats per year).
Every year I'd take 'em into the whirlpool room to work on a burn victim, or some poor old stroked out person iwth massive bed sores, or someone about to loose a leg from diabetic ulcers and complications thereof...
And every year one or two of 'em would quit and change majors....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Isn't that a "Right" down there in the Excited States?
Or does that not apply to Colleges and Universities?
It's a shame she doesn't have the money to fight this, or a decent lawyer could likely get her a HUGE settlement, with compensation for everything she has to endure over all this B.S.
Looks like she'll be suffering under the (potentially) false accusations (and summary conviction) op these offenses against the institution.
I'd just like to know: Just how much evidence contrary to the accusation does she need to be exonerated, or is she just doomed?
Negga please.
In my experience, school administrators don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. It's very, very likely the school is dead wrong about this student. Here's what happened to me in high school:
One day, a bunch of names were called to the office across the school's announcement system. Mine was among them. I found it odd that I was the only non-Chinese name to be called, but off I went to see what was the matter. I sat in a chair in the waiting area by the front of the office next to a bunch of Chinese students as I saw them being called into a spare office one by one.
When my turn came, I was greeted by this fatass sweatbag we all knew to be the idiot "admin" who was on a lowest-bidder contract to a bunch of other schools in the area to feed the wheel-hamsters that ran our Novell Netware based network. My fucking god does he look smug today, I thought.
Posturing himself like he's some kind of police interrogator, he asks me, "Doing a bit of hacking on the school network, are we?"
I say, "No, I haven't." Which was the truth. "What proof do you have to back up this accusation?"
With a grin, he pulls a piece of paper from a folder and emphatically slams it on the desk in front of me. "That's not what these LOG FILES are saying!"
I look at his "log files", which is really just a printed out screenshot of Windows Explorer navigated to my personal file directory on the network. Then I realize what the idiot feels so proud of himself for finding.
NetHack.exe
"That's not a hacking tool." I say with a chuckle.
"The program name says NET HACK. Clearly it's for HACKING the NETWORK," he sputters.
This is the part where I got a bit shouty. "That's a video game, you moron! It's been in development since 1983! How much is this school paying you to be this fucking retarded?!"
"Well, how am I supposed to know that's all it is? You expect me to double-click on THAT? I'm not a fool, I won't fall for your trap!" he blubbers.
"You run it in a sandbox, or on an offline computer, or you... I dunno... LOOK IT THE FUCK UP. In any case, I'm leaving this office, and if you pursue any further accusations against me, I'm prepared to use this very situation and experience to demonstrate your incompetence."
"Well... uh... you're not supposed to play video games in school."
"Fuck you, retard. You have nothing on me. Let me go, or I will have you fired."
He let me go. I never got into trouble, not for "hacking" and not for having a video game.
But that's just one example of how schools jump to conclusions based on the "expertise" of morons.
What are you talking about? I did all my clinical rotations online, and am now a heart surgeon! Youtube is amazing! I'm also an architect specializing in high-rises, bridge engineer, and highly qualified EOD technician. Never could have done any of that without wikipedia and Kahn Academy.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
If someone was hacking into her system remotely, aren't the odds pretty good that she and the hacker would have at least one instance of being both active on her laptop at the same time?
Us has more Canada has less
With the Internet nowadays, you can learn about ANYTHING you want, for free.
Yes, especially things like "the Earth is flat" and "Hillary Clinton is an actual, practicing witch"
There are two kinds of IQ tests: Raven's progressive matrices (in the laboratory) and the abuse of small words (in real life).
Massive fail.
Everyone here who has never seen anyone get the right answer on shoddy evidence, raise your hands. Those of you with your hands down, you may continue to consume News for Nerds.
The rest of you I'd like to see after class. Please bring a small, packed suitcase, and your favourite air-miles card, so I can credit you for all the catapult miles lovingly bestowed.
And they changed multiple records just to cover who was paying. And when people started talking, they made sure to blame the poor foreign student that can't afford representation and the local authorities won't bother defending.
There was a movie about it and everything...
If someone breaks an entering they go to jail, similarily, if an adult hacks your computer network, they go to jail. Why? If they do it there, they will do it elsewhere. You don't irresponsably send them back to a foreign country. You isolate them from society so we don't have burglaries and breakages.
I might not think they deserve 10 years in federal jail, and I might think hacking far lesser of a crime of the two to be honest, but at the end of the day, they sure as heck deserve 6 months and a felony conviction on their record.
Either they have forensic grade evidence or they do not. They may have had suspicions and they rolled with them. Furthermore, we have this magical concept of an ACID Database with a transaction log, it's not like every single transaction on the system can't be cryptographically signed these days; it's not like you won't spot the changes and their source if your database is configured right and it's not like that's terribly expensive to do either.
If their evidence is, however, not sound, get a lawyer and get a pay day.
Sue Tufts for her lifetime expected income as a veterinarian and her student loans. Plus -unitary damages to discourage this reckless behavior. Her alibis and witnesses sound pretty convincing. Even if Tufts reverses itself, she is still tarnished for life. She also should in her court case demand Tufts reverse the expulsion, validate her earned credits and pay for her to complete her degree (of her choice) in a different university, of her choice. I’m not litigious but I am outraged.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Tufts University is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. https://www.neche.org/for-the-public/comments-complaints/ Multiple specific complaints can be registered from insufficient due process, to use of evidence from non-qualified professionals to the fact that Tufts has essentially admitted to graduating a tainted class. I know the investigator was non-qualified, because they apparently did not insist on imaging her computer as part of the investigation at the beginning of the investigation. They only have 95 students in the 2019 class, they could have and should have imaged everyone's computer at the beginning of the investigation.
There were two rootkits found in the laptop, meaning anyone could have connected to her laptop and do the actual hacking.
Though still altering a grade should be easy to trace as it should leave a trail in the database logs that the actual grade was changed
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
They will also stop giving loans for worthless degrees, so double win.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When I attended Tufts years ago (university, not the vet school) there was indeed a somewhat lengthy process for student disciplinary action, especially during which expulsion was possible. I personally knew two students that faced expulsion for an off campus racist act, and they were given weeks to prepare before facing the board after being notified by letter. Both hired attorneys, whom attended the hearings - one was expelled and the other allowed to graduate (he was a senior and it was second semester before graduation) but with serious disciplinary action taken against him. I cannot imagine that this was sprung upon her without effort to prepare and defend herself, nor that she was not advised by anyone to retain an attorney.
That said, I also performed some networking work at the Vet School campus (40+ miles from the main campus) as the IT team there was limited.
What format is that? Oh, I see, the app has an edit button. That makes sense. You should have lead with 'I'm an idiot'.
As a child I always wanted to be a veterinarian. Then I spent about a year working for one after school, mainly cleaning, but also tending/walking animals in residency, and sometimes doing labs and assisting on surgeries. I was fine with most of it, until one day we got a dog that had some sort of blocking miscarriage, and to save the dog the vet decided to remove the uterus (containing a number of mostly developed puppies). Somehow when the last cuts were made, that uterus slipped off the table and hit the floor and living/dying gore went everywhere. Cured me of that. I quit shortly thereafter.
Went into biology/chemistry and worked with PCBs and amphibians for a bit, then decided that wasn't for me either and became a computer tech and later a programmer.
She didn't offer a computer image of her MacBook before she wiped it, and that's where the only forensic evidence lived that would possibly exonerate her. Of course, that's gone now, and maybe she knew that. While there's parts of this article that ring a little strange on both sides, even one act of impropriety on her part (such as enlisting an accomplice) is condemning.
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