Schoolboy hacker Omar Khan who upped his grades faces 38 years in jail

reply to post by 123space

At one time we had teachers who knew how to handle pranksters like Khan. Putting him in jail at all is stupid. In the old days he and his friends would have met the board of education and would have been stuck cleaning up classrooms for a month.

The sentences handed out for hacking are crazy.

Gary McKinnon is facing life in Guantanamo Bay at the moment for his hacking crimes!! WTF?

The Governments of the world need to figure two things quickly:

1) Don't connect secret systems to the INTERNET (duh!)

2) Get better security.

Until they do the above, they're just asking for trouble, IMHO.

They've suggested that Gary caused $5000 worth of "damage" to every computer system he broke into. Uhhh.... HOW?

[edit on 21-6-2008 by mirageofdeceit]

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984
The kid was smart but lazy, that's a common thing amongst very intelligent teenagers. He was under a lot of pressure, caved in and used his skills for something that should not have been done.

There's not much skill in breaking and entering a building and then stealing the keys (passwords) to a computer network and changing characters in a few fields. The Kid is/was a lazy ass, agreed - but there's nothing smart about breaking in to government buildings, stealing exams & passwords so you can steal more from an anonymous location later.

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984

He deserves punishment, and he will get it, he doesn't however deserve a prison sentence that is longer than that given to some murderers. Rapists, pedophiles and murderers, all of these people are worse than this kid and yet lots of them get shorter sentences.

He is no different than a murder, rapists, arsonist, thief or vandal. He broke more laws than most murders or rapists, except for the serial type that get put away for life. He is a criminal no matter how you look at it.

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984
Does a kid who changed his grade deserve a longer sentence than a paedophile or a predatory rapist? Ask yourself that seriously. He should be given a few years,

If a pedophile or rapist had sixty-nine counts of repeated crimes - I guarantee they will never be getting out of prison once they're caught.

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984

hell even Kevin Mitnick got a shorter sentence than this! Take a look at what Mitnick did, just study his crimes and then look at his sentence. He got far less time than this kid is going to get.

Kevin Mitnick paid his dues and this kid will too. In fact Mitnick's crimes were far less than this kid. Kevin did not do B&E's. Kevin did not bring others on board and create a little crime gang.

Originally posted by ImaginaryReality1984
Come on, for all those out there baying for this kids blood, you don't understand hacking, you don't understand the people who do it and when you hear hacker you immediately jump on the government pulled bandwagon.

I as well as many others here understand hacking more than you know. I've hacked many networks in order to learn how it's done & how to plug holes.

Hacker: Give me a target & I will violate them break in and steal or manipulate the data for personal selfish gain.

Burglar: Show me a building and I will break in steal and destroy it for personal selfish gain.

Arsonist: Show me an object and give me a match and I can burn it for personal selfish gain.

Rapist: Give me access to a human and I will exploit them and violate them for my personal selfish gratification.

Criminal: They will violate the law, break locks, not follow rules, hurt people, destroy property all for personal selfish gain.

This burglar hacker & thief fits the mold and should go to prison and think about how to live amongst us and follow the rules or fight us and go to prison again.


[edit on 21-6-2008 by verylowfrequency]

The guy was wrong to change other students grades if it was without their prior knowledge.
Hacking is seen as a huge crime these days because hackers are always lumped in and confused with identity theives.
Real hackers don't cause damage, don't steal identities and don't hurt innocent people.
Real hackers are seekers of truth and freedom in a cyber world that once was free, seekers of information that is kept un-rightfully hidden from the public the information affects.
Real hackers belive in open source and in not paying for things that would otherwise be free if it were not for profiteering corporate shills backed up by corrupt govenments, they hack to find the knowledge of programming and source code that was once open source but stolen by glutenous companies trying to make a quick buck of the back of others work.
Governments and corporations use their own version of hackers to steal information from the computers of millions of users all over the world, governments call hacking legal when they do it in the name of security of the state but then call it illegal when real hackers do the same to protect themselves and the public information domain and open source.
Now personally i couldn't hack a tree with and axe but below is something that made me do some research into the real hackers and their intentions.
It is one of the greatest things i have ever read.

This was written years ago by someone called THE MENTOR.


"The Hacker Manifesto
by
+++The Mentor+++
Written January 8, 1986


Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...

Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world...

Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."

The malicious hacker should be stopped, but the innocent hacker should be left alone to do their thing.

(edit to make it not a one line post, even though i have added to the discussion and yet had nothing more to say.)

[edit on 21/6/2008 by smokey101]

reply to post by smokey101




What if the 'innocent' hacker accidently screws up a companys computer or even worse - on an individual basis - gets into your computer, doesn't steal anything, but destroys a lot of important files of yours?


I wonder too, how you'd like to have a boss who got where he is by hacking his way into college with false grades, hacking his way to good grades there and then getting a high-paying job?
A job that someone else deserved just like getting knocked out of your shot at a college by someone who cheats.


Once the trial - or whatever - starts with this young 'gentleman' I hope a curious reporter interviews some of his schoolmates and finds out what kind of person he really is.

I'm betting that he won't be described as a sterling member of the community, but rather someone who cheats and lies and has done so all his life....

reply to post by Desert Dawg


If the guy does any damage whatsoever then he stops being innocent doesn't he.

(edit to make it not a one line post again)

[edit on 22/6/2008 by smokey101]

How much time do you think someone would get if a student changes the grade of a fellow student in their class (or at another university) without the other student or any professors knowing it. A classmate of mine changed my grade as a joke in a software system our school uses for our rotations & feedback in pharmacy school. He changed it back, but showed me how to not only change other students grades, but also how to change grades and look at students in other Universities as well as look at all their personal info.

If this guy is up for 38 years for changing his grades, I'm sure it would be quite higher for breaking into other schools and changing grades of multiple students. If fellow students can access your info & grades, you should demand the school fix it ASAP... That's serious stuff. Regarding software that students can easily log into one anothers accounts and accounts of other schools, that seems a bit much. Perhaps if this some type of local software developed by a few grad students at the school, but why would other schools use it? Sorry, not buying it.

reply to post by verylowfrequency

He is no different than a murder, rapists, arsonist, thief or vandal. He broke more laws than most murders or rapists, except for the serial type that get put away for life. He is a criminal no matter how you look at it.

Wow. You can't be serious.

You sound smart.

WOULD YOU RATHER LIVE NEXT TO THIS GUY?? OR ONE OF THOSE?

reply to post by 123space


in my local community there was a kid who did this the year before last. His dad is a VA hospital doctor from Laos. This kid just got suspended from the tennis team and did a semester of ISS.

Why the hell is the law getting involved? Have those people lost their minds?

reply to post by Grafilthy


Yes, I am serious.

Your analogy about who I would rather live next to is flawed - the hacker can victimize the target without living next to them which makes him even more dangerous for he can travel the earth in nano seconds and do his crime from the comfort and anonymity of his home.

The problem is there seem to be allot of people like yourself who don't realize the seriousness of burglary & hacking (burglarizing computer systems). Just because the walls & doors are made of bits & bytes does not lesson the damage done by essentially breaking into a vault of information and then destroying the integrity of information by changing it. Again it is what robbery is to a bank, fire is to a building and rape is to a human being.

[edit on 30-6-2008 by verylowfrequency]

reply to post by patel5555


To patel5555: I did some research on the subject over the weekend regarding the Pharmacy school software access that you "don't buy" and how simple it is to access info on other students. The program is called PEMS (ROi / EMS / pems) and I discovered it is not a system developed by our school. Its a private company and it looks like all the pharmacy schools use it: www.memsweb.com...

To access other students, all we need to do is log into our account, simply roll back number in the URL at the top of the browser after the following: studentframe.asp?AID= It seems we all have their own ID numbers that are shown after the AID= and the numbers are sequential. Changing the number allows access to other student accounts. Students can change email addresses, phone numbers, passwords, etc.

To access students from other schools, we just find the pems login page for the school (simple Google search for PEMS login pharmacy). Examples:
www.ems-webs.com... - Mass college of pharmacy
www1.ems-webs.com... - Iowa
www1.ems-webs.com... LECOM
While logged in, we can just replace the first part of the URL up to the end of the school name and replace it with an other schools login url and hit enter or refresh. Sometimes it works and sometimes not… not sure why. We then enter that school PEMS account, if we play around with the number after AID=, you eventually hit a specific student account. There is more you can do too.

To access our preceptor’s account (to potentially change grades), the PID appears on mouse simple mouseover. This is the preceptor’s ID number. We can just replace the word studentframe with preceptorframe, then change the AID- number to the preceptors number. Lots of stuff going on.

From... www2.ems-webs.com...
To... www2.ems-webs.com...

To prove I am telling the truth, I was in the Rutgers account and it looks like they have some type of portfolio. Here is the url..
www2.ems-webs.com... I can see their students by adjusting the AID= numbers. 2200 is Richard W, 2197 is Sandy W, etc. I also went into MCP and can access student portfolio info. The number next to the Docid in the url leads to the files that they have in their portfolios and I can roll back the DocID number and access every file. For example this one is for April N.
www.ems-webs.com...
This is from Priscilla K
www.ems-webs.com...
Christine A
www.ems-webs.com...
It looks like their students have thousands of these docs. I hope they don’t have patient data!!!!
I discovered I can access pems info without logging into my pems account as well. I did a few Google searches and came across a preceptor in the pems system for Rutgers . This was in Google and I was not logged into my account! www2.ems-webs.com...
By changing the number after PID= gives we can access to all the preceptors for Rutgers . Mary F is 17, Connie P is 19, Monica A is 25 and so on. If I change Rutgers to SIUE in the URL, I can access ALL of Southern Illinois preceptors. Allen’s is PID=100, Altom mem Hospital is PID=101, Anderson Hospital is PID=102.
DO YOU "BUY IT" NOW?????

[edit on 30-6-2008 by arthur1987]

[edit on 30-6-2008 by arthur1987]

If he had just paid attention in class anbd actually worked for the grades he wouldn't have had to do this, then he would actually have a carrer ahead of him. I mean, an F to and A?! yeah thats not obvious is it? I can understand an F to a C but the teachers are bondd to notice such a huge leap in grade, they gave it to him. He got what he deserved.

reply to post by verylowfrequency

Your analogy about who I would rather live next to is flawed - the hacker can victimize the target without living next to them which makes him even more dangerous for he can travel the earth in nano seconds and do his crime from the comfort and anonymity of his home.

No.....I don't think so. I will take my chances living next to the hacker 10 out of 10 times. Feel free to live next to some rapist half-way house and see how that goes for you. Go ahead....bring the kids!

There is no comparison.

You used the "poor analogy".

reply to post by Grafilthy


Well, personally I'm not afraid of anyone and we all live amongst and next to criminals without being aware of it because most are not caught or convicted. So, again your analogy is worthless - in my opinion. Criminals are criminals whether they rape your computer or rape your flesh.

[edit on 3-7-2008 by verylowfrequency]

reply to post by verylowfrequency


Replace "flesh" with your wife or daughter or mother and then tell me how dumb that sounds.

There is no comparison.

Let him rot in a cell, he committed a crime and was caught. Funny how he was so stupid to change it from F's to A's.

Maybe F to C would have been more believable.