{"id":55830,"date":"2020-09-03T16:53:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T23:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theaegisalliance.com\/?p=55830"},"modified":"2026-10-02T22:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T05:40:10","slug":"florida-teenager-accused-of-cyberattacking-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaegisalliance.com\/zh-cn\/2020\/09\/03\/%e8%a2%ab%e6%8e%a7%e7%bd%91%e7%bb%9c%e6%94%bb%e5%87%bb%e5%ad%a6%e6%a0%a1%e7%9a%84florida%e9%9d%92%e5%b0%91%e5%b9%b4\/","title":{"rendered":"Miami-Dade Teen Who DDoS’d Virtual School Got Probation While a $15.3 Million K12 Contract Was Never Fully Signed"},"content":{"rendered":"

MIAMI, FLORIDA \u2014<\/strong> The only person Miami-Dade County ever put in front of a judge for the cyberattacks that wrecked the first week of pandemic school was a 16-year-old junior at South Miami Senior High. He admitted eight distributed-denial-of-service attacks. He told a judge it was a mistake. He received a year of probation and 30 hours of community service. The $15.3 million learning platform he helped knock over was never fully signed, the company behind it wrote a $1.57 million check to the superintendent\u2019s foundation before the contract was executed, and the man who ran the district later left for Los Angeles and resigned there on June 21, 2026, while the FBI was looking at a different vendor deal entirely.<\/p>\n

Those are four different facts. They share a building. Treating the teenager as the whole story is how a school district hides a purchasing failure inside a police blotter.<\/p>\n

Eight attacks, and a name the public never got<\/h2>\n

Classes for the 2020-21 year opened on August 31 with more than 270,000 students pointed at a product called My School Online, sold by K12. Teachers could not log in. Rosters vanished. Parents filled the school board\u2019s inbox. Miami-Dade Schools Police Chief Edwin Lopez said the district would not rest until everyone involved was caught and brought to justice. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho called it \u201cdisheartening that one of our own students has admitted to intentionally causing this kind of disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

The student, then 16, was charged with using a computer in an attempt to defraud, a third-degree felony that can mean five years if a prosecutor moves the case to adult court, and with misdemeanor interference with an educational institution. His name stayed sealed because he was a minor. Detectives worked with the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The district said the servers were not breached and no student records were taken. Carvalho told the board that some of the traffic looked as if it came from Russia, Ukraine, China, and Iraq, and he also said a rented denial-of-service tool does not prove a foreign government was behind a teenager\u2019s mouse.<\/p>\n

A DDoS attack is a blunt instrument. It does not steal files. It hires or hijacks a crowd of machines and has them knock on one door until the door stops answering. Justin Cappos, a computer scientist at New York University who looked at the failure, pointed at outdated software and at capacity the district was already struggling to provide before any student pressed a button. Police later said the teenager orchestrated no fewer than eight of at least two dozen attacks that hit the opening days. Attacks continued after his arrest. So did the crashes that had nothing to do with him, including a Cisco switch the district blamed for the first morning and trouble on the Comcast side of the pipe.<\/p>\n