21-year old You Li, a former undergraduate at the University of Utah, has been indicted by a federal grand jury and kicked out of school for hacking into the University's network to change his math grades.

The Chinese national was indicted on two charges - accessing a protected computer to commit fraud and obtaining information from a protected computer:

He also used the professor's password to the University's math department computer to access that system and a file on that system and to change one or more of his grades in the professor's class to better grades, including changing at least one grade from failing to passing.

Li also wrote and installed, the indictment alleges, a program in the professor's math department computer account that would run when the professor logged in, falsely notifying the professor onscreen that the professor needed to enter his user ID and password for the University's administrative computer system.

The file that Li allegedly changed was actually a backup file and the professor kept track of student grades in a primary file on a laptop computer.

This news article was written on March 4, 2006, quoting Linux Electrons.