By Jamie Freestone
A Perth university student has avoided a jail sentence, after hacking into over 200,000 student profiles at the University of Western Australia.
Ming Han Ong, 24, is an aspiring software engineer. During his sentencing in Perth Magistrate’s Court on Friday, the court heard he hacked the system for the challenge, but stopped short of using any of the data he obtained.
Ong walked out of court with a suspended prison sentence. Credit: Nine News Perth
Ong was halfway through his master’s degree at the university when he designed a program to ‘scrape the portal’, trying for over five months before hacking into 207,000 UWA student profiles and saving 43,000 of them.
He gained access to names, dates of birth, addresses, photographs and academic records.
The program ran for 11 days, filtering profiles down to those within his own cohort. But he then logged into a computer at the university club and deleted the data.
In court, it was revealed that Ong was also trying to please a friend who wanted to modify the transcript of a particular student that he had wanted to punish.
During sentencing, magistrate Catherine Crawford said the nature of the information he had access too was “extremely sensitive.”
“In the wrong hands it may be utilised to cause significant harm, adverse consequences and inconvenience,” she said.
“There would have been considerable anxiety and concern among the student population.”
But she took into account Ong’s youth, remorse and guilty plea, handing him a seven-month suspended prison term.
Ong did not answer questions on how he felt about what he had done outside of court.
with Nine News Perth
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