Former North Springs Student Accused of Hacking System, Changing Grades

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The Fulton County Schools Police Department is investigating an incident in which a former North Springs Charter high School student allegedly hacked into the school system’s files and “changed assignment grades for a small number of students.”

That’s according to a letter to parents written by North Springs principal Eddie Ruiz informing them of the incident, which occurred in December.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is helping the school system in its investigation, Ruiz added. The student, who has not been identified, is cooperating with investigators.

The letter was released by the school system to Patch and reads as follows:

Dear Parents,

I want to make you aware of a situation that may bring negative attention to our school.

In December, we discovered that a student (no longer at North Springs) gained unauthorized access to a third-party application used by our school. Using this application, FCS email login information was accessed for 21 faculty members and the student was able to see any information that was transmitted in their email messages. We are still investigating, but the student also gained access to our student information database using the staff members’ same login information and changed assignment grades for a small number of students. This has been rectified. These activities occurred between March 2014 and December 2014.

The former student confessed to the activities, received disciplinary consequences, and is cooperating fully with investigators from the Fulton County Schools Police Department as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which has been involved because of its specific expertise in technology issues.

There have been some reports of employees experiencing unauthorized activity on their credit cards. We have no evidence that these situations are related, as the information gained by the student only contained the information accessed from FCS emails. Nonetheless, our FCS School Police Department and the GBI are aware and investigating. We have no evidence that students’ or faculty members’ social security numbers were accessed.

It deeply concerns all of us that any student or employee could have had their personal information accessed. The school district is offering identity and credit monitoring services through LifeLock® to all North Springs employees at no charge for one year. Please know that the district is continuing to improve the security of our networks and is training staff and students on digital citizenship and proper security to keep this situation from occurring again.

Sincerely,

Eddie Ruiz

Principal