High School Student Hacks Teacher's Laptop to Steal Exam Papers, No CCTV in Staff Room... Schools Unprepared for Evolved Cheating Methods

Two Gwangju Daedong High School Students Caught Stealing Exam Papers from Teacher's Laptop
Hacking Completed in 20 Minutes... Education Field Unprepared for Evolved Methods

The scene of Daedong High School in Seo-gu, Gwangju, where the exam paper leak occurred on the afternoon of the 26th./uk@yna.co.kr [Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Intern Reporter Yunjin Kim] The leak of final exam answer sheets at Daedong High School in Gwangju has shocked society. It has come to light that the school was defenseless until a current student directly hacked a teacher's computer, prompting calls for educational institutions to review their security measures in line with technological changes.

On the 26th, the Gwangju Western Police Station announced that they had booked two Daedong High School students, A (17) and B (17), without detention on charges of obstruction of business and trespassing, suspected of stealing final exam answer sheets to cheat. Further investigation the next day revealed that they had leaked answer sheets using the same method during the midterm exams as well. The two students admitted most of the charges and stated their motive was "to get into a good university."

While cheating to manipulate internal grades has evolved in various ways, it is unusual for students to directly access teachers' computers to obtain answer sheet information, as in this case. Daedong High School in Gwangju was embroiled in controversy in 2018 due to exam paper leaks, but that incident involved a school administrative staff member leaking exam papers at the printing stage at the request of a student's mother, who was the chairperson of the school operation committee. According to the police, no frontline teachers have been found involved in A and B’s crimes so far.

This incident appears to have occurred because the school's lax security and surveillance failed to prevent the evolved criminal methods. The two students visited the school late at night last month after all teachers had left and broke into the teachers' office through a window with its lock disengaged. Although a security guard was stationed at the school at the time, they did not notice the intrusion. The second-floor teachers' office had a manual alarm system that was not activated, and the fourth-floor teachers' office was found to have no security devices installed.

After studying the layout of the teachers' office in advance, they installed malicious code created by B on the work laptops of the exam-setting teachers. The malicious code was a modified version of malware B downloaded from the internet, containing a program that saved the laptop screen as an image file at regular intervals. Although the laptops required a security password input procedure, they easily bypassed it by interpreting password error codes.

According to the police, it took only about 20 minutes per laptop to implant the malicious code. A and B broke into the teachers' office again a few days later to retrieve the image files containing question information and then deleted the program from the teachers' laptops. The leaked final exam answers covered a total of nine subjects. The police stated, "It has been confirmed that they illicitly took answers for seven subjects, excluding English, from the second-year first semester midterm and final exams."

There were no closed-circuit TVs installed in the teachers' office, and the school reportedly did not realize the intrusion until the police investigation began. There were virtually no effective security measures in place to respond to the students' break-in and exam paper leak. Since this may not be an issue unique to Daedong High School, there are calls for a comprehensive review of schools' educational and exam-setting environments.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.