What Looked Like a Michigan Teacher Posting a Racial Slur Was a Student Hacker

A Rockford High School student managed to hack the school's website message board and make it look like a teacher made a racial slur.

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Remember School Bulletin Boards?

Do you remember school bulletin boards? I do, because when I was growing up that is where as students we would find out things that affected all of the students.

Now that I'm thinking about it, there was a school billboard when you entered the school, there were billboards in each classroom, and there were often billboards near certain departments of the school. Well, that has all changed since I was a kid.

Public School Websites and Message Boards

Nowadays it's not just the kids that get informed, but the parents do too with school websites, message boards, and even apps for your phone.

Parents get school messages via email or messages to their phones through school apps. I think it is really handy ever since I got the app from my son's school because up until then I had to rely on my son's mom to tell me stuff, often at the last minute or not at all, and now I'm in the know, too.

Rockford High School Student Hacks Schools Website & Message Board

In a strange turn of events at Rockford High School, the school's Assistant Principal Eric Cavalli was made to look like he posted a racial slur on the school's message board.  A student was able to get into the system and manipulate the code to push the message out, take a screenshot of it, and then the message went away from the message board. The message had been created a while ago, but the person held on to the screenshot until releasing it recently on Snapchat.

According to WOOD, the school faculty knew it was out of character for their assistant principal Eric Cavalli to make a derogatory statement about African Americans and then post it. Students were quick to have spotted the message and alerted school officials who then put their technical department on investigating the matter and proved, in fact, it was a hoax and Cavalli had nothing to do with the message.

What is really amazing about this story is the students also alerted school officials on how the person could manipulate the code to send the message out. I even did a little research and saw a how-to link online to do this sort of thing which was shocking.

The students showed the school faculty how to adjust the code, make the fake message, send it out, and how the message would disappear once the system was refreshed. Sounds like some of these students have a bright future in I.T. or Internet security systems. In the meantime, the school is working backward to find the original person who did the hacking. Odds are, this person is in some very big trouble.