A particularly kancheong law student of the Singapore Management University (SMU) got on the wrong side of the law when he was caught logging into his professors’ accounts in an attempt to re-take an examination.
Gaining access into the account, the 32-year-old Russian national deleted his examination scripts as well as 18 other scripts, hoping to get a second try at the examination to do better, TODAY reports.
Georgy Kotsaga — a student of SMU’s Juris Doctor Course — was said to have feared getting a low Grade Point Average (GPA), which would disqualify him for legal practice in Singapore. Instead of, you know, buckling down and doing better in his studies, he went through the whole effort of hacking into the accounts of two law professors who taught the subjects he was performing weakly in.
A USB hardware keylogger was bought from Sim Lim Square, which Kotsaga used to plug into the common desktop computers in the professors’ respective classrooms. The device captured their usernames and passwords when they logged into their SMU eLearn accounts.
On Nov 24 last year, he used his iPhone to log into one of the professor’s accounts after having difficulties answering the questions in his final examination. He viewed the scripts of other students taking the same test.
Later that same day, he logged into the professor’s account again and realised he wasn’t going to do very well in the exam. Thus he deleted his scripts as well as 18 others in the hopes for a chance to re-take it again.
The whole thing came to light when a course-mate sent an email to the IT department after she noticed that her examination attempt had been marked as “0” even though there should be a “1”. Furthermore, SMU’s IT system makes real-time backup of contents, so his attempts to delete the scripts did nothing.
Investigations traced the hack all the way back to Kotsaga, who was found to have gained access to another professor’s account.
He could have been fined $5,000 and/or jailed for two years for making unauthorised access of computer material plus a further maximum fine of $10,000 and/or three years in jail for unauthorised modifications.
