Keylogging could be leading to student grade inflation

In a life-imitates-art plot resembling a scene from the movie comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,⁽¹⁾ it appears that a handful of students from Maryland’s Winston Churchill High School allegedly could have used special USB-based keylogging devices to gain access to teachers’ passwords, enabling the grades of 54 students to be changed in the school’s grading system.  The Washington Post has been following this story.

As a tiny $70 piece of USB hardware (readily available from Amazon.com among other sources), keyloggers (keystroke logging devices) are placed between the end of a keyboard cable and the USB port it connects to. As a piece of hardware, it won’t be detected by a computer’s anti-virus software, nor will it always be spotted by a user.

These devices record every keystroke and save it to its internal memory, without running any software on the host computer. Later that data can be accessed and read, and used to gain account log-ins, passwords and other sensitive data.

The Washington Post reports that School officials in Maryland’s Montgomery County Schools are considering adding new security options, such as prohibiting USB devices and moving to wireless keyboards, or adding layers of security such as keyfobs which generate ever-changing log-in routines (expensive fixes to be sure). Outside of that, more frequent password changes and visual inspection of computers for spurious devices are options.

Meanwhile, this episode has not only served to spark intense internal security investigations at this school district, but it has opened the eyes of educators, parents and teachers to be ever vigilant—not to mention going back to basics of recording grades on paper as a back-up.

⁽¹⁾In the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris, played by Matthew Broderick, hacks into Dean of Students Edward Rooney’s computer to change the number of days missed from nine to two, much to the consternation of the principal as he watches the numbers change right under his watchful gaze.  Back at home, Ferris looks to the camera and deadpans, “I asked for a car. I got a computer. How’s that for being born unlucky?”