Spanish police have arrested a suspected hacker for accessing a authorities web site in an effort 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 Jaén is mentioned to have raised the alarm after he discovered his account on the Schooling 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 laptop techniques with out authorisation, identification theft, altering grades, and hacking into the emails of college professors.
In keeping with investigating officers, the work accounts of a minimum of 13 professors from numerous Andalusian universities – together with Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Seville, and Jaén – have been hacked.
A few of the affected academics are mentioned to have been answerable for making ready 2025’s college entrance exams (referred to as the PAU or Pruebas de Acceso a la Universidad.)
The PAU is a normal take a look at taken by Spanish college students to realize admission to universities.
Police sources say that the arrested man, who isn’t related with the Jaén college, has a historical past of laptop 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 dwelling, laptop 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 isn’t a brand new phenomenon, and we’ve reported on many related breaches which have had related motivations up to now.
As an illustration, in 2016, we reported on how a scholar 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 scholar 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 laptop system to inflate his grades within the hope of reaching an Ivy League school.
Spain’s Séneca 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 because 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.
