Walstrom a 17 year old boy in Staten Island, New York charged with computer tampering pleaded guilty this week. Eric Walstrom had been accused of hacking into computers belonging to the Department of Education (DOE) and New Dorp High School for improving his grades. He was a student at New Dorp High School between December 2014 and February 2015.
According to the The New York Daily News, Walstrom is going into a Mental Health Court program. Under the terms of the plea deal, if he completes the program he will be sentenced on a misdemeanor on April 27. He had used his own computer to reach into the DOE’s computer and manuipulate his records, according to the court paper. A search warrant issued by a judge was executed on Feb. 10, 2015, and his computer was seized.
A law enforcement source spoke, saying: “You’d think a kid smart enough to hack his school’s computers would already have good grades.” “Maybe the DOE should hire him to expose weaknesses in their security firewalls”.