Spanish police have arrested a suspected hacker for accessing a government website in order to alter the high school and university entrance exam grades of not only himself, but also some of his closest classmates.
A teacher at the San Juan Bosco secondary school in the city of Jaén is said to have raised the alarm after he found his account on the Education Ministry’s Séneca platform, used across the Andalusia region of Spain, had been compromised.
The 21-year-old man arrested by police in Seville is accused of accessing computer systems without authorisation, identity theft, altering grades, and hacking into the emails of university professors.
According to investigating officers, the work accounts of at least 13 professors from various Andalusian universities – including Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Seville, and Jaén – have been hacked.
Some of the affected teachers are said to have been responsible for preparing 2025’s university entrance exams (known as the PAU or Pruebas de Acceso a la Universidad.)
The PAU is a standard test taken by Spanish students to gain admission to universities.
Police sources say that the arrested man, who is not connected with the Jaén school, has a history of computer hacking. If only he’d spent as much time revising as he did learning to hack, he might have earned those grades legitimately, and sailed his way into university.
During a search of the man’s home, computer equipment believed to have been used in the hack was seized by the authorities, as well as a notebook containing a list of grades that had been manipulated.
Hacking grades is not a new phenomenon, and we have reported on many similar breaches which have had similar motivations in the past.
For instance, in 2016, we reported on how a student in the US state of Georgia had been arrested for breaking into his school’s grading system, as well as stealing sensitive information and passwords.
That incident was followed by a security breach at the University of Kansas which saw a student use a keylogger to steal login credentials that allowed him to upgrade his failing grades to straight “A”s.
On another occasion, a New Jersey teenager hacked into his High School’s computer system to inflate his grades in the hope of reaching an Ivy League college.
Spain’s Séneca platform, which is commonly used by teachers, students, and their families to manage grades, is said to have now had its security tightened up as a result of the incident.
Let’s hope so. If a hack like this had occurred and was not revealed until years later, it could have seriously shaken the public’s confidence in the education system.
