Teen hires attacker to DDoS his school district

A high school boy might have to face state and federal charges for allegedly hiring a third party and launching a DDoS attack against the West Ada school district, Idaho, US.

A 17-year old high school student (the name cannot be disclosed because of him being a minor) might be accused of launching a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack after hiring a third party.

The attack crippled operations at more than 50 schools of the district for a week previously this month.

DDoS is a type of attack in which the servers of a particular online service are slowed to such an extent that their processing ability gets clogged up.

According to KTVB report, the West Ada students suffered assorted misery due to the attack such as they lost their data on the Idaho Standard Achievement tests. Some of the students also had taken the tests multiple times.

The attack lasted around a week and during this phase the online classes and textbooks could not be accessed. Moreover, the faculty and staff also experienced problems in accessing business and administrative systems such as payroll.

The IP address from where the attack was launched was finally traced by the school district’s IT staff, which led them to the high schooler. The boy has been suspended from Eagle High but school administration suggested that he should be expelled.

According to the Sheriff’s Office, the seventeen year old will most likely be charged with computer crime felony, which can send him to a juvenile detention facility for up to 180 days as the teenager paid someone to overwhelm the system with traffic from multiple sources.

Additionally, the boy’s family will also be held responsible for a financial restitution for covering the losses since operations at around 50 schools got disrupted due to the attack. 

This is not the first time when a teenager attacked an educational institution. In April 12, 2015, Domanik Green, a 14-year-old student studying at Florida’s Paul R. Smith Middle School managed to bypass the school’s computer security network using just his computer skills and gained access to the server that contained FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) data.