A 16-year-old kid from Concord, California has been arrested and charged with a whopping fourteen felony counts for hacking into his school’s intranet system and changing a bunch of grades.
Now, this is some wholesome ’90s TV show shit -a high school student outsmarting the technologically-challenged teaching staff and bumping his and his friends’ grades up. A+ for effort
This is how he did it: he sent a bunch of emails to all his teachers with a link. The link, should the teachers click it, sent them to a website he built, which mirrored the design of the school’s portal, and prompted them to enter their username and password.
Brilliant so far, except a lot of teachers smelled a hack, and forwarded these emails to local cops.
One trusting teacher did not smell a hack, and instead did enter their details; the kid had access to the hallowed Mount Diablo Unified School District IT network and BAM! He went on a grade-changing spree, which included adjusting “ten to fifteen” students’ grades.
Cowabunga, right?
Wrong.
Wrong?
Now, this basically happened in an early ’90s episode of Beverly Hills 90210 when Steve Sanders (played by the charming Ian Ziering) used his “freshman buddy” — who was a geek and therefore knew the intricacies of computer hacking — to change his grades in the school’s computer system.
Cops came to the school to heighten the drama, Andrea investigated for the high school newspaper (the award-winning West Beverly Blaze), but he ultimately got away with it, because computer hacking isn’t a multi-episode arc kinda story. Most ’90s TV shows that adopted this plot ended up with the perpetrator scoring detention or a call home to their parents.
Not so this kid. Fourteen felony charges.
The cops traced the IP addresses used to the student’s home, who quickly owned up, later crowing to ABC7 News “It was like stealing candy from a baby.”
Our hero of the week.
