15-Year-Old Canadian Hacker Charged for Breaking into School Website
A London, Canada, region’s public school board will have to spend more than three weeks to fix a privacy breach created by a 15-year-old self-proclaimed hacker who exposed the passwords of 27,000 high-school students, Toronto Sun reports.
Police charged the teen with breaking into the Thames Valley District school board’s website Oct. 23. It was the largest security breach in the board’s history, according to Toronto Sun.
Within an hour of students’ usernames and passwords being posted, the student and parent portals were taken offsite. Although the parent portal was not breached, it was taken down as a precaution.
The portals will remain down for another week, and students and parents have been without the portals they use for grades, timetables, and absentee reports for three weeks.
The teenager is charged with intercepting a computer function, fraudulently obtaining computing services, using a computer with intent to commit a computer offense and using a password to commit a computer offense.
This is a rather scathing article. Other stories on this detail that this student did this to demonstrate the weak security inherit in the portal software being used.
It’s a pretty low blow to write the story like the student made the TVSCD spend three weeks to fix the security problem. He simply forced them to do something they should have already done.
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You know, instead of pressing charges, the school should thank him for finding a hole in their computer security. It is the fault of the system administrator utilizing bad security rather than the fault of the curious teenager.
If curiosity were to be disciplined, what message would that convey to our children? That curiosity is to be frowned upon by society?
IMO, if we were to not rightfully correct this, on one hand we will have students not eager for learning, and on the other hand we would have a system where students aren’t disciplined correctly.