High School Kid Accused Of Cyberattacks On Miami Schools

MIAMI, FL — A 16-year-old high school student was accused Thursday of carrying out multiple cyberattacks that prevented thousands of his fellow students from accessing online classes at the nation's fourth-largest school system.

"In addition to these local attacks originating from the South Florida community, most specifically the one perpetrated by this 16-year-old student, there are other attacks from foreign nations such as Russia, Ukraine, China, Iraq and possibly others," Miami-Dade School Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho said Thursday in announcing the arrest.

The junior at South Miami Senior High School was charged with computer use in an attempt to defraud, a third-degree felony, and interference with an educational institution, a second-degree misdemeanor.

Carvalho said the attacks linked to foreign countries were not necessarily initiated by those countries.

"Through the dark web there are means by which one can purchase these types of services, which are highly disruptive," Carvalho said.

Court documents said the teenager admitted to eight separate attacks that targeted the Miami-Dade County Public Schools network. School officials said he used an online application to carry out the attacks.

Neighbors described him as a good kid who didn't cause trouble in his neighborhood.

"These attacks are sophisticated. They are relentless and they have a deep impact but the acquisition of the resources to launch them isn’t that difficult," Carvalho said. "Money can buy access to entities in this country, and beyond, who are willing and able to basically dispense of these tools of interference which have disrupted our school system immensely over these past three days."

Classes resumed Monday for the district's 345,000 students following an extended summer break only to end in frustration for many children and their parents, some of whom took to social media to share their frustration in what was often colorful language.

In addition to the cyberattacks, the district wrestled with a Cisco software connectivity switch issue that Carvalho called one of the "greatest disappointments" of his tenure before he learned his district was also hit by a series of cyberattacks.

He described the cyberattacks as a distributed denial of service, which sends millions of packets of what appear to be individual IP addresses to computer servers in an attempt to create bottlenecks.

One legal observer told Patch it is common for courts to take away the computers of defendants who are convicted of computer crimes. But, in this case, Miami-Dade students are limited to online classes, which might pose a challenge for the court.

The attack-generated IP addresses competed with those of legitimate students and teachers for access to the system. The school district's cyber wall held but the attack affected the district's internet provider, Comcast, according to the superintendent.

Investigators traced one of the IP addresses back to the teenager's home. Miami-Dade schools police worked with the FBI, U.S. Secret Service and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to find the teenager, who was arrested shortly before 3 a.m. Thursday.

Despite the cyberattacks, school district officials said 218,000 students successfully managed to connect to the system.

See related:

• Miami Schools Hit By Massive Cyberattack On First Day Of Classes
• Miami School Glitch Fixed; Classes Start Tuesday
  
• Miami-Area Children Face Technical Glitch On First Day Of School

Carvalho said the district's ability to respond to legitimate technical problems was diminished by the cyberattacks. The last cyberattack is believed to have occurred around 3 a.m. Thursday.

"Unfortunately, shamefully, as we were launching a new platform that we knew would have glitches as is inherent to the deployment of any big initiative, we were basically blinded to what some of those issues were because we were unable to see the problems as they were happening," Carvalho said.

"Without actually receiving information from principals and teachers about specific important elements of the disruption, we could not get to work in terms of rapidly fixing them," the superintendent added.