[ISN] Computers hacked at Hilton Head Island High

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.”