HS Student/Hacker Facing 38 Yrs. in Jail for Trying to Change His Grades on School Database

Four decades in jail for a school boy stunt?
Orange County, CA prosecutors trying 18 year old on 69 counts.

UK Times reports

It could be a long time before Omar Khan goes to college: as long as 38 years, according to Orange County prosecutors, who have arrested and charged the 18-year-old student with breaking into his prestigious high school and hacking into computers to change his test grades from Fs to As.

If convicted on all 69 counts, including altering and stealing public records, computer fraud, burglary, identity theft, receiving stolen property and conspiracy, Mr Khan could spend almost four decades in prison.

He is currently being held on $50,000 (£25,500) bail and is scheduled to appear in court today.

Mr Khan's defence lawyer, Carol Lavacol, described her client as "a really nice kid" and said: "There's a lot more going on than meets the eye."

Prosecutors claim that between January and May, Mr Khan, who lives in Coto de Caza, one of Orange County's oldest and most expensive gated communities, repeatedly broke into Tesoro High School, which was made famous by the reality TV series Real Housewives of Orange County.

n an alleged plot that resembles the script to the 1986 high school comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, prosecutors claim that he then used teachers' passwords to hack into computers and change his test scores. In at least one test, an English exam, Mr Khan had been given an F grade because he was caught cheating.

Prosecutors claim that the teenager, who is alleged to have broken into the school late at night with a stolen master key, also changed the grades of 12 other students, and that he installed spyware on school hard drives that allowed him to access the computers from remote locations.

Tesoro High has 2,800 pupils and often appears in Newsweek magazine's annual list of best high schools.