Lower Merion's Laptop Tracking Easy for Hackers to Breach

Security firm hacks into district’s remotely activating webcams in just hours

It took employees of Leviathan Security Group just hours to successfully breach the Lower Merion School District’s laptop tracking system, proving that any capable hacker could have access to not only webcam’s of Lower Merion students, but any of the thousands of school districts nationwide that use the same system.

A Leviathan engineer was able to quickly figure out the administrative password to the system—lines from a German poem, reports the Inquirer.

The results of the Leviathan experiment was first reported by Wired Magazine last week and then presented to the Lower Merion School Board Monday night.

"This is not about just one school in Pennsylvania," Leviathan chief executive officer Frank Heidt told the Inquirer. "There are thousands and thousands of copies out there."

The ability to virtually hack into student’s homes is just the latest in the scandal brought to light by Blake Robbins vs. Lower Merion School District earlier this year.

Robbins filed a federal lawsuit in February claiming the district spied on students in their homes. It was later discovered that the tracking system took tens of thousands of photos remotely on student laptops over a two year period.

District officials have acknowledged secretly activating webcams to locate 42 missing laptops. They say Robbins' webcam was activated because he wasn't authorized to take the laptop home. An internal school district investigation produced a 70-page report early May that said the district failed to preserve students' privacy.

Heidt and other Leviathan officials said that they don’t believe anyone did in fact hack into the Lower Merion system, and they said the exercise was not meant to fan the flames of  Lower Merion's scandal. They said they only wanted to repair the flaw in the system.

Leviathan will be sending the fix to Absolute Software, the company that makes the tracking system, for free.

Heidt told the Inquirer that though he doesn’t know much about the case against the school district, the use of webcams as laptop tracking devices seemed a little extreme.

"This cure was so much worse than the disease they purported to fix," Heidt told the Inquirer.

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Robbins has until June 7 to seek class-action status in the suit.
 

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