9-year-old blamed for hacking school system

Searching for the hacker who broke into the computer system of Spring Hill Elementary in Virginia, the police was more than little surprised when the investigation revealed that the culprit is a precocious 9 year-old student of the school.

According to Computerworld, the first sign that something was amiss was the teachers’ and staff members’ inability to access their accounts because their passwords had been changed. This was followed by the discovery that some courses’ content and enrollment information was changed or deleted.

The investigation also discovered that the student didn’t actually hack the Blackboard system used by the school. “It was actually not a hack, unless you consider the fact that the 9-year-old took the teacher’s username and password from the desk a hack,” says a Blackboard vice president.

In any case, the student wasn’t able to do serious damage – changing grades or accessing other machines in the systems was impossible for him to perform, say the Blackboard representatives.

Tying the IP address from which the system was accessed to a physical address, the police knocked on the door of the student’s mother. She was the primary suspect, but after interrogating both of them it became clear that the child was to blame.

The police says there won’t be any charges against the boy, saying that there was no “criminal intent” on his part. It is yet unknown whether he will be sanctioned by the school.