ComputerWorld reports that officials at Fairfax County Public Schools thought they had a hacker on their hands. It was reported that someone was changing teacher passwords on the Falls Church, Virginia, school district’s Blackboard system. Blackboard (BBBB) gives teachers, students, and parents a way to communicate and stay on top of homework assignments and class announcements over the Web. Blackboard’s website says more than 5,000 K-12 and higher-education institutions nationwide use its software.
The District contacted local authorities when teachers and staff members reported their passwords were changed preventing access to their accounts because according to ComputerWorld. Changes to content and enrollment information for some courses was also discovered. The local police investigated and pulled a search warrant for Cox Communications, the Washington Post reports. They traced the IP address which accessed the Blackboard system to the McLean, Virginia physical address of the home of a 9-year-old student in Fairfax County Public Schools. The police initially suspected the student’s mother, but after interrogating both of them it became clear that the child was to blame.
Turns out that the Blackboard system was not hacked. The student had simply taken a teacher’s password from a desk and used it to change enrollment lists and other teachers’ passwords. “This was a case where an individual … got hold of a teacher’s password, and the passwords had administrative rights,” said Paul Regnier, a school board representative. “It was actually not a hack, unless you consider the 9-year-old took the teacher’s username and password from the desk a hack,” said Michael Stanton, Blackboard’s senior vice president of corporate affairs. Although there will be no criminal charges filed against the perpetrator, citing school policy, Regnier wouldn’t confirm that it is a student, the Fairfax school board is taking the incident seriously, Regnier said. “Nothing bad happened this time, but we have to make sure that … it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
rb-
T
his event correlated with the recent (04/14/2010) Tufin Technologies survey results of the hacking habits of 1,000 New York City teenagers. The survey found that 39% of the teens surveyed think hacking is “cool” and 16%, or roughly one in six, admitted to trying their hand at it. Only 15% of the entire sample has either been caught or knows someone who has – particularly disturbing considering 7% of young hackers reported they did so for money and 6% view it as a viable career path.
The big lesson here is, of course, SECURE YOUR PASSWORDS
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.