A 16-year-old teen accused of launching a cyber-attack that temporarily shut down Miami-Dade’s online classes. The teen used a simple, easy-to-download distributed denial of service program to overwhelm the servers. Miami-Dade is the nation’s fourth-largest school district. The teen is accused of orchestrating no fewer than eight of at least two dozen cyber-attacks. The first three days of the districts virtual classes were halted due to the attacks.
What alarmed cybersecurity experts was the simplicity of the attacks. According to experts, the district should have been able to ward of an attack this simple. The student admitted to using a tool called “Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC).” This tool easy to download and even easier to operate. This was a point-and-click program that doesn’t need a great degree of sophistication to operate. This was the same tool that the hacker group Anonymous used a decade ago to cripple companies such as MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.
Experts and law enforcement officials were shocked that the school’s servers could not handle the LOIC attack. Official’s stated that the firewalls on the district’s computer network should have been able to detect and mitigate the attack. One expert said this attack was “really easy to prevent,” and the schools router configuration must really be out of date. Experts were shocked that a school district of Miami-Dade’s size could be taken down so easily.
The student faces a felony charge of using a computer to attempt to defraud and a misdemeanor charge of interference with an educational institution. The student will likely to be charged by Miami-Dade prosecutors and tried in state court, and not by federal prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The school is being encouraged to use federal resources, provided by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secure its networks, including virtual classrooms.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article245461020.html
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