A student hired hackers to attack schools of the West Ada school district

An Eagle High School student may be charged with a felony after being accused of a cyber attack on the West Ada school district.

I have decided to write about this story because it is the demonstration of the interference of cybercrime with the teenager’s life, a 17-year old high school student might be accused of attacking his school with a hit-and-run distributed denial of service (DDoS).

The 17-year old boy, whose name cannot be disclosed because he is a minor, has hired hackers to coordinate an attack against his school and other 50 institutes of the West Ada School District.

“The 17-year-old boy launched a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the computer network for the entire district earlier this week, the Ada County Sheriff’s Office said.“Our ability to access the internet would just stop,” said Eric Exline, spokesperson for the West Ada School District.The cyber attacks have been affecting the school district’s computer systems for the last week and a half.” reported the KTVB report.

The sheriff’s office has no doubts, the teenager hired someone to flood the systems of the district with malicious traffic. Apart the problems related to the interruption of online services in the district, the attack has caused the destruction of the Idaho Standard Achievement tests, students lost all their work.

Despite KTVB hasn’t provided further details there are many aspects of the attack that are not clear, a DDoS attack can paralyze the system saturating its resources, but it cannot wipe data from systems, so why the schools have lost their data?

“It’s really frustrating for kids to have to do that day in and day out,” added Exline.

The attack lasted an entire week blocking the access to online classes and textbooks, at the same time administrative services experienced severe problems.

The boy has been suspended from Eagle High, and he is risking the expulsion from the institute. The seventeen-year-old will likely be charged with computer crime felony and risks the detention  in a juvenile facility for up to 180 days.

The boy’s family will also be held responsible for a financial restitution for covering the losses caused by the DDoS attacks against the schools of the district.

The cyber crimes committed by teenagers are increasing due to the low perception of the criminal act. In April 12, 2015, the 14-year-old student Domanik Green violated the network of the school and gained access to the server that contained FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) data.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Student, hacking, cybercrime)