Reference no: EM133497168

Assignment:

Fake Scenario:

Scenario 1 - M. (full name redacted due to age) lives with his parents and attends seventh grade at XYZ Middle School. He is a good student with a small group of friends that have attended school together since kindergarten. He has always been interested in computers and recently joined a cyber team training to attend a Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competition later in the school year. As part of his training for the competition, M. watched YouTube videos on password cracking and began testing open-source software like John the Ripper. Over the recent school break, he was getting in some extra practice and thought it would be interesting to see how secure the school network resources were. Before attempting other tools, he thought he'd just try logging in with an obvious username and password.

Fully expecting to fail, he stated in his initial interview that he was surprised "administrator" and "Superintendent" allowed him to gain access to the school network, including administrator access to the student grade database and a shared folder for school board members. "I was only logged in for 20 minutes", M. told Investigator Smith. Investigators from the Digital Investigations Unit (DIU) concluded after a two-week investigation that the grades of three students in two classes were altered during this login. DIU investigators also concluded that one disciplinary file belonging to a teacher was transferred from the shared folder to Dropbox. Subsequently, the contents of the file were shared via Twitter and Facebook. M. has admitted that an older student on the CTF team, Jacob Montgomery, DOB 6/14/2000, assisted him with posting the file.

What crimes were committed? Who were the victims? How serious are the crimes? Are they felonies? Should a plea deal be offered to the defendant? If so, what charges could be considered dismissed instead of the plea, and how might the sentence(s) be reduced? If not, why not? Are there any mitigating circumstances? Will the charges/plea deal/possible sentence serve as a deterrent for others?