
Bit of burke!
Old enough and daft enough to know it was wrong and you don't break into somewhere to prove bad security without having first asked permission to test the security.
Well done kiddo, you've knacked your chances of a job in IT then.
A 15-year-old who allegedly broke into a school board website before exposing the passwords of 27,000 fellow schoolchildren has been charged with computer hacking offences. The unnamed Ontario youngster from the Thames Valley area had earlier claimed that he had only carried out the hack to expose the board's weak security. …
He's a school child, by definition he is not old enough to know better or be responsible. Schools who resort to the legal system to enforce school discipline have lost the plot.
When I was that age I got caught doing far worse to school computers just for the hell of it. I got detention and banned from the computer room for a few weeks.
Daily Rotation is headlining this story as "UK Teen Charged with school board hack" and pointing to this Register page (which correctly identifies the teen as Canadian).
The teen in question comes from a broken family (single mom living with boyfriend) and has little structure in his life. He has several times tried to explain and show school board IT people how insecure their servers are, and his public exposure of 27k student ID/Passwords was the final attempt to wake them up. I heard all this on the local radio news broadcast this morning - this story happened in my city - London ONTARIO, a much better version of London England, complete with the Thames river.
(I don't know why the school board needs to operate a central IT infrastructure for students in this day an age when they can get gmail and facebook for free from the private sector - another waste of school-board tax dollars as the electronic hand-holding and page turning in schools continues to get out of control - but at least we don't have electronic face recognition here like you do in schools in the UK).
A big hand written essay on what needs to be done to fix the problem, and what would have happened if they had put him through the justice system.
Teachers these days have NO imagination.
(Econet, cleaners thinking you have permission, physical access, those were some fun times...)
IT developers write software that allows a school kid to crack it - let's punish the kid.
IT department uses built-in camera in PC to take thousands of photos of kiddies at home - let's give them a slap on the hand and tell them not to do it again.
IT techies have it easy with the US legal system.