Montgomery County school officials have not yet closed gaps in their computer system that allowed students at a high-performing Potomac high school to change dozens of grades using a device that can be bought from Amazon.com for $69. And other school systems, including Fairfax County, remain just as vulnerable, school officials said Tuesday. At least eight students at Winston Churchill High School are believed to have used the readily available device to obtain teachers' passwords for the school system's grading system. The school system, Maryland's largest, has determined that the grades of 54 students were improperly changed in 35 teachers' records.
"There are solutions out there, but we have to figure out which one fits best for us," said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Montgomery County schools. "We have to believe that our students are doing the right thing."
At a community meeting Monday night, schools Chief Technology Officer Sherwin Collette said the school system thinks students used a device that connects to the end of a keyboard's cord and then is plugged into the computer. Such devices can record everything that a teacher types without ever running any software on the computer itself. A similar gadget was the 11th-best-selling "computer security device" on Amazon.com Tuesday afternoon.
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