Most school hacks carried out by their own pupils, watchdog says

[6Foot2]

Link: Most school hacks carried out by their own pupils, watchdog says - BBC News

 

Quote

More than half of school and college cyber attacks and data breaches are being carried out by their own pupils, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has revealed.

 

School children and college students are carrying out hacks and accessing private data for fun or as part of dares, the ICO says, calling it a "worrying trend".

 

It is warning teachers that they are failing to understand and recognise what it calls the "insider threat" pupils pose.

 

"What starts out as a dare, a challenge, a bit of fun in a school setting can ultimately lead to children taking part in damaging attacks on organisations or critical infrastructure," said Heather Toomey, Principal Cyber Specialist at the ICO.

 

It comes amid a spate of high profile cyber-attacks, affecting firms including M&S and Jaguar Land Rover, in which teenage hackers have been implicated.

 

Since 2022, the ICO has investigated 215 hacks and breaches in education settings and says 57% were carried out by children...

 

When I was working as Network Manager, I got repeat visits from two students over the years (possibly more that I am not recalling at the moment) telling me that they had "hacked" the network or telling me about "weaknesses" in our network. Now, it appears, it is happening for real.

 

[dmj]

In other news, the terrorists that used to call in bomb threats on exam dates were also students !

 

Back in about 2005 we had a year 8 who ran a zero day and gave himself 'administrator' permissions to he could play games. At least he didn't encrypt everything!

[Davit2005]

Amazing what you hear sometimes. We had a student in a previous employment who used to brag openly to friends, there was no quota on storage cause it was never setup. File share ran out of storage and guess who was the main user by a country mile. Home folder full of downloaded pirate goodies.

 

This also enforces that between malware, virus, etc and the internal users you need protection from inside as much as out. 

[Synkrox]

I had a student that went on to get arrested a few years later for shifting DDOS software on the dark web.

Actually bumped into him a couple of years ago and we recognised each other.

[mavhc]

The difference now is there's loads of forums where kids share the secrets, they'll happily sit there for hours trying every exploit listed, and then when they find one I'll block it

[ITGuyNW]

We've had a couple of students in the 10 years I've been here do malicious stuff that have ended in exclusion.

[Dos_Box]

They've been doing it ever since I started in education, over 25 years ago now. I blame The Matrix!
It was quite innocent back then though, NT4.0 systems with Win 98 clients were never going to be secure...ever, but as has been mentioned earlier, the kids were doing it more so out of curiosity, and especially back then, the awareness of how much damage this could do and the trouble they could get in was still not at the forefront of youngsters minds. In fact many kids, as said before, would tell you about what they had found so you could fix the problem. 
When I started in my first school, I was rather shocked to find one of the brighter pupils had an admin account! I soon put a stop to that. TBH, he was rather smart and went off to uni to study computer science.

[6Foot2]

1 minute ago, Dos_Box said:

... I was rather shocked to find one of the brighter pupils had an admin account! I soon put a stop to that. TBH, he was rather smart and went off to uni to study computer science.

 

One of the guys that came to see me (almost) every day:

1. Was dating my technician's daughter for a while.
2. Eventually became network manager for a school in the next town over, a few miles away.