University grade hackers face twenty year sentence
Two California State University students face up to twenty years in jail for hacking the academic record keeping software to raise their grades. It might be a cute plan in an eighties movie (WarGames, anyone?) but in the real world that’s called unauthorized computer access, wire fraud and conspiracy. Which aren’t cute – and when you’re going to jail for two decades, you better hope you’re not cute either.
Working in the university’s IT help center, John Escalera obtained his supervisors password and from there gained access to accounts which could modify the institution’s academic records (as reported in PCWorld). The hilarious part is that the indictment alleges he used "computer hacking techniques" to gain the supervisor password, a phrasing doubtless including by said supervisor to avoid being fired for carelessness, letting someone watch him type in his password or possibly even saying "Hey John, do this install for me, the password is TerribleSecurityPractices".
As well as changing his own grades, Mr Escalera bumped up the marks of fellow student Gustavo Razo in exchange for cash. This turns out to be an even more expensive proposition than they first thought, as involving money probably raised the number of criminal charges involved by a factor of 2.
The fact is that secretly altering your grades will never help, because no matter how big the numbers in a database are people can immediately tell if you’re stupid. That was proved here, where the grades were found to be changed several times over a period of six months, as opposed to the "once" which might conceivably have gone undetected. Or the "never", which would have kept them out of jail.
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February 7th, 2012
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