http://www.islandpacket.com/front/story/6536804p-5816824c.html Packet Staff Report June 1, 2007 Beaufort County School officials said Friday they’re investigating a case of apparent computer hacking that’s resulted in altered attendance records for at least a dozen students at Hilton Head Island High School. Several of the students whose attendance records were altered were summoned, along with their parents, to the high school Friday morning to meet with principal Helen Ryan. Ryan said the interviews with the students have led school officials to focus on the student suspected of altering the records. Neither the name of that student or any of those whose records were altered can be be released because of confidentiality laws, school officials said. “We’ve got somebody ID’d that we believe we’re going to take disciplinary action against,” Hudson said. In some cases the students’ attendance records — before being altered — showed that they had too many absences to receive credit for a class, Ryan said. In other cases, it wasn’t clear why the records were altered because the students didn’t have excessive absences. Ryan said more students than the 12 identified so far may have had their attendance records altered, adding that the investigation is “ongoing.” The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office also is involved in the investigation, she said. Ryan and school district spokesman Tom Hudson said the records appear to have been altered selectively. “It wasn’t a wholesale thing,” Hudson said. “It looks like a number of individual records as opposed to across the board.” It’s unclear how a hacker could have penetrated the computer network to get access to the students’ attendance records, both Ryan and Hudson said. “We thought we had put in as many stop-gaps as we could,” Ryan said. She said the records are maintained on a “statewide database — it’s not a local system they hacked into.” So far, the investigation indicates that the altered records belong to juniors and seniors, Ryan said. She said the problem could not have been the result of a random computer glitch. “No,” she said. “It was done intentionally.” _____________________________________________________ Attend Black Hat USA, July 28-August 2 in Las Vegas, the world's premier technical event for ICT security experts. Featuring 30 hands-on training courses and 90 Briefings presentations with lots of new content and new tools. Network with 4,000 delegates from 70 nations. Visit product displays by 30 top sponsors in a relaxed setting. Rates increase on June 1 so register today. http://www.blackhat.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Sun Jun 03 2007 - 23:36:05 PDT