Spanish police have arrested a suspected hacker for accessing a authorities web site with a view 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 college within the metropolis of JaĆ©n is mentioned to have raised the alarm after he discovered his account on the Schooling Ministry’s SĆ©neca 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 methods with out authorisation, id theft, altering grades, and hacking into the emails of college professors.
Based on investigating officers, the work accounts of at the least 13 professors from varied Andalusian universities – together with AlmerĆa, CĆ”diz, CĆ³rdoba, Seville, and JaĆ©n – have been hacked.
Among the affected academics are mentioned to have been chargeable for making ready 2025’s college entrance exams (often called 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 is just not related with the JaĆ©n college, has a historical past of pc hacking. If solely heād spent as a lot time revising as he did studying to hack, he might need earned these grades legitimately, and sailed his approach into college.
Throughout a search of the person’s house, pc tools believed to have been used within the hack was seized by the authorities, in addition to a pocket book containing a listing of grades that had been manipulated.
Hacking grades is just not a brand new phenomenon, and we’ve reported on many comparable breaches which have had comparable motivations up to now.
As an illustration, in 2016, we reported on how a pupil within the US state of Georgia had been arrested for breaking into his college’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 Collegeās pc system to inflate his grades within the hope of reaching an Ivy League faculty.
Spain’s SĆ©neca platform, which is usually utilized by academics, college students, and their households to handle grades, is alleged to have now had its safety tightened up on account of the incident.
Let’s hope so. If a hack like this had occurred and was not revealed till years later, it may have critically shaken the general public’s confidence within the training system.
