They made $12,845 / €9,212 after changing the scores for 200 students

May 8, 2014 20:49 GMT  ·  By

As more and more schools start storing students’ grades on computers, the number of hacker attacks against these systems increases. The latest incident comes from China, where two students at a college in Shanghai’s Songjiang District have been arrested for allegedly changing grades for 200 of their colleagues.

According to the Shanghai Daily, the college students in question, named Chen and Zhang, didn’t attend morning physical education classes too much. To make sure they wouldn’t get poor grades, they hacked into the school’s website and changed their performance scores.

After word got out that they could hack into the website, other students turned to them for help. They charged between 15 yuan ($2.4 / €1.7) and 20 yuan ($3.2 / €2.3) for each change they made in the school’s database.

A total of 200 students turned to their services. Chen and Zhang are said to have earned a total of 80,000 yuan ($12,845 / €9,212).

The school noticed the changes made to the scores in March and fixed the security hole in the website. The suspects were arrested after police was called in to investigate.

More and more high school and college students turn to such methods to bump their grades. We’ve seen numerous cases in the United States over the past period. Last week, a Miami high-school student was arrested after he changed his own grades and the ones of four others.