Student charged with hacking school computers — Greenville Online

A student was charged with “hacking.”

The J.L. Mann students were able to gain access to the network by using an administrator’s password one of them had been given when he was working as a summer intern for the district’s information technology department, a district official told police, according to the report.

The password was never changed once school started, Wade Shealy, director of the district’s Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, told police, according to the report.

This is not hacking. This is leaving your car running at a convenience store because you’ll only be going in to grab some milk — surely no one will steal your car.

The student who had worked as an intern told police that during his time on that job he had “stumbled across” another password that investigators later determined were “the keys to the kingdom,” giving access to the school district’s entire computer system, according to the report.

This is not hacking. This is a total and complete lack of any sense of the common sort. Would you leave your house key hung on a hook outside your front door with a big sign that read “KEY TO FRONT DOOR”? I despise the word “hack” being tossed around so loosely. Finding a password != hacking.

Also, this media sensationalism is ridiculous, too. Every computer system has some account and password that can be called “the keys to the kingdom.” This is usually the password that is actually written down, because it is the important one. (For example, I don’t know if I have ever seen a Guest account, or some equivalent, written down. Think about it, what’s the point?) Therefore, finding a password written down is most likely the password giving you “the keys to the kingdom.”

At worst these kids trespassed, they didn’t hack. QED