15yr old accused with felony because schools lack of security
A 15 year old breached a shenendehowa districts system while in a computer class. He gained access to 250 names of past and present transportation employees of the school system. This boy used his STUDENT PASSWORD to view these employees social security numbers, driver’s license numbers and more. At around 1 p.m. he sent an e-mail to the high school principle saying that he had accessed the database. The principle contacted the police, who arrested the boy and charged him with computer identification info. and identity theft, which are all felonies. This apparently happened when the district upgraded its computer system with the help of third party vendors as well as others said the superintendent.
I think that this isn’t the best thing to do about lousy protection on a system. The boy could of handled it differently and told the principle first that he could access this personal information easily and then gone from there. From the students point of view I think that he was trying to find a flaw in the system and tell them that they needed to patch it, but i do think that he shouldn’t of looked at the personal data. From the administrators point of view I think that they took it a bit far…. depending on whether or not the boy was threatining to do something with this info. First off being charged with 2 felonies as a 15 year old is a lot for just showing the district that they had MAJOR flaws in their computer security. If the district took more time and money into the security aspect of installing a new system then maybe they wouldn’t of run into this issue in the first place…there has to be something said about this type of stuff….as technology advances children and the younger people in this world are going to be the ones knowing more about this kind of stuff than the older ones. With that said…children and teens are going to be the ones finding more of the security flaws and regular flaws in systems server wide or home computer type of stuff…partially because they have more time to mess around with that type of stuff than adults do in some situations.
