By Stevie Smith Nov 5, 2007, 14:08 GMT
A pair of pesky grade cheats from California are this week staring down the wrong end of substantial bouts of prison time after being caught hacking into California State University’s ‘PeopleSoft’ system in order to embellish their recorded levels of performance, reports industry watchers at PC World.
2 men in California caught altering university grades after hacking into PeopleSoft database now face 20 years in prison. Credit: MSU.edu
More specifically, John Escalera (29) of Fresno and Gustavo Razo Jr. (28) of Pasadena were charged on October 25 with abusing Escalera’s placement within the university’s Information Technology help centre in Fresno, from where a supervisor’s password information was hacked to gain illegal access to PeopleSoft's grading archives and bump individual grade scores.
Escalera is accused of using hacking techniques to gain user names and passwords for various university registrars and other notable officials, which he then utilised in order to improve his grades; while Razo Jr. apparently paid cash to Escalera for changes to be made to his own grades – which the indictment states happened several times between January 2004 and June 2004
As a result of their actions being discovered, the two men have now been indicted by a federal grand jury on eleven separate counts including honest services wire fraud, conspiracy, and unauthorised computer access. Charges related to identity fraud are also involved, although a spokesperson for California State University has said it is presently too early to discern whether the PeopleSoft tampering had beyond grade fixing in order to actually access sensitive personal information pertaining to others.
While some people may not see the actions of Escalera and Razo Jr. as warranting particularly heavy punishment when gauged against the likes of murder or child abuse, the court’s final sentencing could well see the men slapped with as much as 20 years behind bars and fines amounting to around $250,000 USD.
It is believed that the university’s IT staff caught the grade alterations during a routine audit of the PeopleSoft system, which recently replaced the establishment’s prior Student Information Management System/Relational (SIMS/R) database.
Escalera and Razo Jr. have pleaded not guilty to the charges before U.S. District Judge Gary Austin in Fresno, CA. Both men have now been ordered to return to court on November 16.
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