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posted by chromas on Sunday March 10 2019, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the pencil dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Tufts expelled a student for grade hacking. She claims innocence

As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it.

A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. “as soon as possible.” That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her becoming a veterinarian behind.

Filler, 24, was accused of an elaborate months-long scheme involving stealing and using university logins to break into the student records system, view answers, and alter her own and other students’ grades.

The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.

There’s just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she’s accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others.

[...] Tufts said she stole a librarian’s password to assign a mysteriously created user account, “Scott Shaw,” with a higher level of system and network access. Filler allegedly used it to look up faculty accounts and reset passwords by swapping out the email address to one she’s accused of controlling, or in some cases obtaining passwords and bypassing the school’s two-factor authentication system by exploiting a loophole that simply didn’t require a second security check, which the school has since fixed.

Tufts accused Filler of using this extensive system access to systematically log in as “Scott Shaw” to obtain answers for tests, taking the tests under her own account, said to be traced from either her computer — based off a unique identifier, known as a MAC address — and the network she allegedly used, either the campus’s wireless network or her off-campus residence. When her grades went up, sometimes other students’ grades went down, the school said.

In other cases, she’s alleged to have broken into the accounts of several assessors in order to alter existing grades or post entirely new ones.

The bulk of the evidence came from Tufts’ IT department, which said each incident was “well supported” from log files and database records. The evidence pointed to her computer over a period of several months, the department told the committee.

[...] A month later, the committee served a unanimous vote that Filler was the hacker and recommended her expulsion.

[...] Many accounts were breached as part of this apparent elaborate scheme to alter grades, but there is no evidence Tufts hired any forensics experts to investigate.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 10 2019, @05:24PM (4 children)

    You sexist racist literally Hitler!

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    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 10 2019, @06:37PM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 10 2019, @06:37PM (#812372) Journal

    ROFL at your post, and ROFLMAO at the moderator who didn't think you were funny.

    • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @08:21PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @08:21PM (#812396)

      Triggered much?