Palos Verdes Student Hackers Arrested for Grade-Tampering

Three apparently “very bright kids”, students at the Palos Verdes High School in California, were arrested after being suspected of hacking into their teachers’ computers to change grades. Besides computer hacking, they’re also accused of breaking into the school at night to steal physical copies of tests, with the purpose of selling them to classmates before exams.

According to Daily Breeze, the four teachers whose computers were hacked had no idea of what was going on, until a student brought to the attention of the school’s administrators that the three hackers were changing grades.

After analyzing the grades from the computers and comparing them to ones written down on paper they noticed discrepancies.

Palos Verdes Estates police Sgt. Steve Barber told reporters that the grade-tampering schemes began several months before, after the students picked the lock to a janitor’s office when the school was closed.

With the use of a master key they stole, they entered the classrooms and installed keyloggers on the computers, allowing them to record the usernames and passwords used by the teachers to access the grading systems.

The keyloggers were stored on USB flash drives and in order to obtain the information recorded on them, all the fraudsters needed to do was to remove them from the computers they were attached to.

By using the credentials they fraudulently obtained, the students accessed the Edline system from their own homes to change their grades and the ones of two others.

Investigations revealed that the three may have broken into the school around 20 times to steal tests and up to 12 students were involved in the grade-tampering plot.

The school’s principal believes that the teachers don’t have anything to do with these crimes and they can’t be held responsible for anything since the teens only acted at night.

Two of them are currently recommended for expulsion and others were suspended for receiving stolen tests and other information.