Student used phishing attack to change grades

Phishing attacks are commonly employed by Scammers to steal passwords. The way they work is that the hacker sends a link to someone, whose URL looks very similar to the original website's URL. Once the victim logs on to the fake site, and enters his/her password, the hacker steals the username and password right away.

But who would have thought that a Phishing scam could also be used by someone to change the grades of students. But this is exactly what was done by a student, as reported in this article.

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According to that article, a student at Ygnacio Valley High School, in California, sent the link of his fake website to several teachers by e-mail, and at least one teacher clicked on that link and logged on to the fake site. The website obviously looked very similar to the original one. Once the teacher entered his username and password, the student stole them and then used them to login to the original website to change grades of 10 to 15 students, besides his own grade!

The student was caught after the police obtained search warrants for the IP addresses associated with the phishing emails, which led them to his home.