14 DAY TRIAL // During the past month and a half, at least 45 students at Beau Chene High School in Arnaudville, Louisiana, enhanced their educational scores by accessing without authorization a platform used by the school to keep track of student grades.
The exact circumstances that allowed modifying the academic level of the students are not known, but it appears that the illegal entry was facilitated by a legitimate set of credentials.
Money was not the only form of payment
The web application breached is PowerSchool, and it is employed by other educational institutions in the US, offering access to grades to teachers, parents and students.
According to one senior student at Beau Chene, one of his colleagues may have obtained the password of a full-time teacher after they left and passed the PowerSchool credentials to a substitute, who received help from the culprit with logging in; this explanation is also embraced by the principal of the school.
Passwords can sometimes be the only defense against intrusions to restricted areas and they are as good a protective measure as their owner allows.
It appears that the grade-changing process affected both the kids the perpetrator liked and those he didn’t (to worse, without their knowledge), and he would also charge money for the modifications, but sometimes the payment consisted in sexual favors.
The total number of students involved is not known for sure
Keith James, principal of the school, said that institution was tipped by a concerned parent and then he asked teachers to look into PowerSchool for irregularities.
Punishments have been imparted to the students who were aware of their grades being modified, at least 45 of them, but it looks like there is no way to know with absolute certainty that all those involved have been identified.
As a precaution, the district’s IT department has enhanced the security measures for PowerSchool in order to detect modification of the grades at an earlier stage.