Spanish police have arrested a suspected hacker for accessing a authorities web site with a purpose 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 stated 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, identification 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 Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Seville, and Jaén – have been hacked.
Among the affected academics are stated to have been liable for getting ready 2025’s college entrance exams (generally known 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 achieve admission to universities.
Police sources say that the arrested man, who will not be related 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 manner into college.
Throughout a search of the person’s house, pc gear 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 will not be a brand new phenomenon, and we’ve got reported on many comparable breaches which have had comparable motivations prior to now.
As an example, in 2016, we reported on how a scholar 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 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 pc system to inflate his grades within the hope of reaching an Ivy League faculty.
Spain’s Séneca platform, which is often utilized by academics, college students, and their households to handle grades, is claimed 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 significantly shaken the general public’s confidence within the training system.
