In an absurd and bizarre series of events, Monday saw the arrest of a 17-year student who hacked his way into the President of Sri Lanka, Maithripala Sirisena’s website just to postpone the A-level exams. This stint costed the teenager a fine of 300,000 rupees along with a potential jail-time of 3 years.
The attacker had removed the home page of the website and replaced it with a demand that the President postpone the ongoing GCE Advanced Level examinations or step down. “We traced the hack to his home in Kadugannawa” a police official said referring to a town about 62 miles east of the capital Colombo.
Whether this act reflects on the immense pressure that Sri Lankan schools might be putting on their kids, or the kind of fragile security of the Srilankan websites have or in fact the boy was out of his wits, it goes without question that the student was certainly driven to desperation.
The website was crippled over the weekend after the attack. Sri Lankan websites have been hacked in the past, but this was the first time that a teenager has been arrested under the Computer Crimes Act of 2007.
