Spanish police have arrested a suspected hacker for accessing a authorities web site so as to alter the highschool and college entrance examination grades of not solely himself, but additionally a few of his closest classmates.
A instructor on the San Juan Bosco secondary faculty within the metropolis of Jaén is mentioned to have raised the alarm after he discovered his account on the Training Ministry’s Séneca platform, used throughout the Andalusia area of Spain, had been compromised.
The 21-year-old man arrested by police in Seville is accused of accessing pc programs with out authorisation, id theft, altering grades, and hacking into the emails of college professors.
In accordance with investigating officers, the work accounts of not less than 13 professors from varied Andalusian universities – together with Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Seville, and Jaén – have been hacked.
A number of the affected lecturers are mentioned to have been accountable for making ready 2025’s college entrance exams (referred to as the PAU or Pruebas de Acceso a la Universidad.)
The PAU is an ordinary take a look at taken by Spanish college students to realize admission to universities.
Police sources say that the arrested man, who just isn’t linked with the Jaén faculty, has a historical past of pc hacking. If solely he’d spent as a lot time revising as he did studying to hack, he may need earned these grades legitimately, and sailed his method into college.
Throughout a search of the person’s residence, pc gear believed to have been used within the hack was seized by the authorities, in addition to a pocket book containing an inventory of grades that had been manipulated.
Hacking grades just isn’t a brand new phenomenon, and we now have reported on many related breaches which have had related motivations previously.
As an example, in 2016, we reported on how a pupil within the US state of Georgia had been arrested for breaking into his faculty’s grading system, in addition to stealing delicate info and passwords.
That incident was adopted by a safety breach on the College of Kansas which noticed a pupil use a keylogger to steal login credentials that allowed him to improve his failing grades to straight “A”s.
On one other event, a New Jersey teenager hacked into his Excessive Faculty’s pc system to inflate his grades within the hope of reaching an Ivy League faculty.
Spain’s Séneca platform, which is often utilized by lecturers, college students, and their households to handle grades, is alleged to have now had its safety tightened up because of the incident.
Let’s hope so. If a hack like this had occurred and was not revealed till years later, it might have critically shaken the general public’s confidence within the training system.
