Two Teenagers Hack a School’s Database

Two students of 'Riverside High School' launched a hacking intrusion into the computer database of the 'Durham Public Schools'. The young hackers downloaded the 'Social Security numbers' and personal information of numerous school employees, the 'Durham Sheriff's Office' said on 14th December 2006.

No charges have been filed against the accusation. School officials, however, reported that they have patched any hole in the network's security. According to a search warrant filed by Det, the attackers downloaded hacking tools from the Internet and used them to get inside the 'Durham Public Schools' network one of the days before December 8 2006.

As said by Nancy Hester, 'associate superintendent of support services', the boy hacker about 16 years old, accessed a file from the computer network of 'Durham Public Schools' that contained the names and Social Security numbers of nearly 2,500 teachers and other employees of the school. The file also had 'account information' of teachers who worked on the school network, such as usernames, said Hester. The teenage student sent some of the information he gathered to a friend, who told a teacher about the incident, as per the affidavit.

When the school students were working on an assignment related to their computer class, they discovered the breach in the district's computer system. The teacher of the class promptly reported the issues to the school's 'information technology specialists', who went to 'Riverside High School' to find how the boys got access to the highly confidential information.

Hester says the school's IT specialists fixed the security problem and since then all employees' information was safe from any unauthorized access.

The school system feels that the boys who reported their findings to their teacher "hadn't done anything wrong" but got in touch with the authorities considering there could be other concerns about the confidentiality of employee information.

The sheriff's office said that no criminal charge was filed against the boys, but the sheriff's deputies seized the boys' home computers as the investigators suspected the hacking been done from there.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/22/2006