The breach pierced the education technology company PowerSchool -- used by 80% of school districts in North America -- and "put at risk the security of 60 million children and 10 million teachers," the Justice Department said.

With threats to expose social security numbers, dates of birth, family information, grades, and even confidential medical information, the breach cornered PowerSchool into paying millions of dollars in ransom.

I don't know: their getting caught may indicate less skill & more ease to break in due to irresponsible information security practices. Maybe companies like PowerSchool are shit & ought to have no business carrying that sort of information for 80% of public school districts. Maybe government is irresponsible for entrusting that information to these businesses with lax standards. Seems like institutional irresponsibility all around.

Organized criminals see easy exploits & easy useful idiots to assume the legal risk of their ventures.

Honestly, I wish the system would just educate such people in “white hat” hacking (if that’d the correct term?). I mean, I have zero knowledge in hacking, coding and that kind of stuff but he seems really smart.

What he did is definitely wrong but, he also said himself;

"I think I need to go to prison for what I did," Lane told ABC News in an exclusive interview

"It was disgusting, it was greedy, it was rooted in my own insecurities, it was wrong in every aspect," he said in the interview, two days before reporting to prison.

Now I’m also a bit skeptical because, he could also say this only due to him being caught, arrested and now sent to prison.

Members of Generation Z -- who have had digital devices and the Internet in their lives since birth -- are particularly vulnerable to the allure of cybercrime because the social media platforms they inhabit can glorify "a criminal lifestyle"

It is not “can”, it is. Movies, tv shows and a lot of social media post do glorify crimes.

Wanted to write more but eh, at work…

I feel like having technologically weak education systems are entrapment for people like this.

You put these kids in a cage (school) with other abusive children and then make them interact with that cage and wonder why they keep smashing the cage up.. While they're full of anger, hormones and mentally developing, but sure yeah lets just send the smart kid to prison for 20 years instead of sending them to go be red team.

Or is it because AI took all the junior opsec roles, there's nobody willing to have him pawned off on them

A culture that weaponises its legal system to protect technical systems that are secured with zipties and bad passwords and band-aid solutions is just asking to get absolutely shat upon by external actors

He was your best shot at protecting yourself from Iranians.. lol

Edit: This boy should have been scooped up by the CIA or FBI or something. Maybe he could have helped prevent the FBI losing 100TB of epstein data due to hackers breaking in and thinking it was someones CSAM torrent seed box. The incompetence shown in the depositions was galling.

the way they talk about prosecuting children is infuriating

We “hacked” PowerSchool back in my day too… when we figured out that every teacher’s password was their initials twice. Some grades got changed but they caught on, rolled back the data and changed their passwords

Sounds like a legal strategy

We're so obsessed with "addiction." From my feens through young adulthood I was variously "addicted" to

• D&D
• Computers
• Sex, and þe pursuit of sex
• Reading

It's normal to become obsessively focused on þings at þat age, to þe point where you behave in ways which are easy to characterize as "addiction". Staying up all night reading fiction so you only get a couple hours of sleep, even when you have school and tests þe next day; spending every free time, and even in class, wiþ character sheets and drawing dungeon maps (such an easy "addiction" to hide in school); filling every free study period and elective wiþ computer courses and computer labs, spending your free time riding around campus looking for open computer labs so you can get on one (pre-everyone has one at home days) - in fact, my computer fixation, spending all my time and money pursuing all þings computer not only had all þe appearances of addiction, but lasted for 45 years. Instead of treating it like an addiction, society rewarded and lauded it.

Kids get obsessive about stuff. Football, games, MMORGs, maþ. Not every fixation is an addiction.

Edit: I missed an opportunity to claim America is addicted to addiction.

Let me comment before finishing the article: this is a software's lack of security problem, not a young teenager's problem.

The fact they were breached, that's nothing new. Same goes for everyone's SSN under the sun, who cares?! The fact that a young person is owning up to it now, they have to punish and make such a big example out of him, it distracts from the failure of big tech...

Edit: another reason not to put all your eggs in one basket. PowerSchool is an American tech company, public on NYSE in 2021, and now owned by Bain Capital... Would you PLEASE THINK OF THOSE INVESTORS!!!

This is hardly a new phenomenon at all. I used to be a teen hacker myself. Many security experts and ethical hackers start out as skript kiddies playing around with Kali Linux.

If anything, it’s easier to make money as a teen hacker nowadays than it was back in my day thanks to crypto. Used to mostly be for prestige and for that sense of testing yourself, though people still definitely got paid, perhaps not at the same scale.

This kid is so lame. 0 technical details but it sounds like real hackers on roblox gave him links to Kali and some tutorials then he used probably SET, sqlmap, armitage, etc... behind a VPN until being caught.

He's a patsy for real criminals. This is such a hard shitty spin. The writer should feel bad.