SECAUCUS — If only a pair of students would have put this sort of ingenuity into their classwork, they may not have been charged.
Two freshmen at Secaucus High School, using an app or a computer program, successfully crashed the school’s Wi-Fi network on multiple occasions to get out of taking exams, authorities said Monday.
Two 14-year-old boys were charged with computer criminal activity and conspiracy to commit computer criminal activity after school officials notified police on Thursday. Because they are juveniles, their names are not being released.
“Our Wi-Fi connection was compromised over the past week,” Schools Superintendent Jennifer Montesano said Monday. “The system has been restored and is now fully operational.”
Montesano didn’t provide additional details regarding the incident, but added an investigation found two students “who may have been involved in the disruption of our system."
Since much of the school’s curriculum is internet-based, the lack of Wi-Fi connection disrupted the students’ daily assignments. It is believed that the two boys took requests from other students to bring down the network.
Students interviewed Monday afternoon believe the boys used a Wi-Fi interrupter program, or an app, to send so much traffic to the routers that the system would crash, which ultimately caused connection failures when students tried to log on, do class work or take exams on their computers.
“One day we were supposed to be doing work on our Chromebooks, but we had no activity whatsoever to do in class because the Wi-Fi shutdown,” said a student in the 10th grade at the 634-student high school on Millridge Road. “It interrupted the whole class, unfortunately.”
A junior at Secaucus High said she learned about the Wi-Fi disruption when a friend told her she had asked one of the boys to jam the signal during an exam.
“He was doing it to get out of tests and stuff like that,” the student said as she stood surrounded by classmates after school Monday. “(One of the boys) was doing it also for (his friend ), so she wouldn’t have to take a test during the class. It was a big prank, really.
Some students said they were surprised kids their age were able to pull off such a stunt.
“I was surprised on how a kid our age, or close to our age, was able to do something like this," said another 10th grade student. Sounding more like a parent than a student, she joked “Kids these days and the internet.”
The student added arresting the two boys seemed a little heavy-handed. “They are messing with people’s education, but they aren’t harming anyone.”
Meanwhile, another student said what the students did was not right.
“I think it was dumb for them to do it,” he said. “If you don’t want to be in a test, you’re going to have to deal with it because he wasn’t the only one who wasn’t going to take that test. It was a whole class."
Aya Elamroussi may be reached at aelamroussi@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @aya_elamroussi. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.