Let me comment before finishing the article: this is a software's lack of security problem, not a young teenager's problem.

The fact they were breached, that's nothing new. Same goes for everyone's SSN under the sun, who cares?! The fact that a young person is owning up to it now, they have to punish and make such a big example out of him, it distracts from the failure of big tech...

Edit: another reason not to put all your eggs in one basket. PowerSchool is an American tech company, public on NYSE in 2021, and now owned by Bain Capital... Would you PLEASE THINK OF THOSE INVESTORS!!!

This is hardly a new phenomenon at all. I used to be a teen hacker myself. Many security experts and ethical hackers start out as skript kiddies playing around with Kali Linux.

If anything, it’s easier to make money as a teen hacker nowadays than it was back in my day thanks to crypto. Used to mostly be for prestige and for that sense of testing yourself, though people still definitely got paid, perhaps not at the same scale.

You’d think they would have approached him about a job working for the NSA or something similar.