School District suffers massive password breach after kid hacks them

guest · May 13, 2020

Second grader hacks system, shows kids how to access any student account
May 12, 2020
https://bocanewsnow.com/2020/05/12/...unty-school-district-student-password-breach/

The Palm Beach County School District is in the midst of a massive computer security crisis that draws into question the authenticity of every assignment completed by every student since “distance learning” began, after BocaNewsNow.com learned that an elementary school student hacked the school district’s password system.

We are not revealing the password convention that is used in the school district, but the second grader’s — you are reading that correctly, the second grader’s — hacking resulted in an emergency login change for “live” morning meetings in several elementary schools last week.
It did not result — yet — in a district-wide reassignment of student passwords for the School District’s “Portal” which provides access to Google Classroom.

It is unclear if teachers and administrators were aware that the second grader’s hack potentially impacted the entire 176,000 student school district.
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Monday, a 10-year-old proved to BocaNewsNow.com that he was able to log into an unrelated 6-year-old’s account with the permission of that student’s parent. The 10-year-old was given nothing but the name of the student in another grade. That 10-year-old — using the hack widely shared among students — needed less than two minutes to find the 6-year-old’s account and enough identifying information to log in as the 6-year-old.

Once logged in, the 10-year-old had complete access to the 6-year-old’s school work, teacher emails, “chats,” and classroom “live video stream.”
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The School District’s I.T. department apparently never imagined that its simple default password naming convention could impact the accuracy, authenticity and online safety of every student in the Palm Beach County School District.
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guest · May 13, 2020

Palm Beach School District Threatens BocaNewsNow Over Password Story
May 13, 2020
https://bocanewsnow.com/2020/05/13/...ct-threatens-bocanewsnow-over-password-story/

In a thinly veiled threat received by BocaNewsNow.com Wednesday morning following our exclusive reporting of a major password hack potentially affecting all students, a representative of the Palm Beach County School District took a “shoot the messenger” approach.

BocaNewsNow.com reported on Tuesday that a second grader used the Palm Beach County School District’s password naming “convention” to figure out how to access almost any other student’s account.
After we reported that students demonstrated the hack to BocaNewsNow.com with full permission of parents who permitted their child’s account to be accessed, the school district wrote to BocaNewsNow.com: “to hack an account, even with the permission of a parent, is a violation of the student code of conduct.”

In the email received by BocaNewsNow.com, the school district representative announced that a new “password change” option was now available to all students, but that “this was not created as a result of your story.”
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Parents contacting BocaNewsNow.com pointed to the safety issues raised by the massive password hack, and expressed concern that grownups — conceivably — could access live video streams of their children.
BocaNewsNow.com learned that older students have long had the ability to change passwords — how many did change passwords previously is unknown.

In a “see something, say something” online environment, the Palm Beach County School District’s threat to BocaNewsNow.com over having children show that a flaw truly existed is astonishing.
As of 10 a.m. Wednesday, The Palm Beach County School District has not notified parents of the hack. Students have not be notified to change passwords.
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