17-years old student arrested for hacking into school database

According to Newsday Matthew Calicchio, 17-years old student of Sachem North was arrested for illegally accessing the Sachem School District’s computer system.

Suffolk County Police arrested a Sachem North student on Friday for illegally downloading and distributing students’ personal records.

Matthew Calicchio, 17, of Holbrook, has stored thousands of student records from a local website and published them on the Sachem school district forum Sachemunspun.com and on 1Apps.com.

A suspicion of unauthorized database access appeared in July and then again in August. The Suffolk County Police Computer Crimes section began an investigation, and after more information was posted online in November, became known that a breach took place.

www.SachemUnspun.com is a local anonymous forum site where variety of topics of all aspects of the district routine is posted every day.

The way authorities identified a culprit and how the hacker gained access to all the information he had posted on the Internet remains unknown.

Stolen data included information about post graduates, school identification numbers and lunch designations.

“The extremely minimal security that was in place was defeated in a very trivial manner, and the system administrators were informed of the issue multiple times,” the website claims. “They were unable to fix the issue, as the districts networks utilize mostly free tools and are extremely vulnerable.”

Matthew Calicchio is currently being held at the Fifth Precinct.

While the motive for the crime is still unknown.