Former BCC student charged with computer hacking to change grades

Tuesday

Jun 3, 2014 at 8:14 PMJun 3, 2014 at 9:47 PM

Curt BrownThe Standard-Times

FALL RIVER — A New Bedford man and former Bristol Community College student is charged with stealing the log-in credentials of three instructors and changing his and two other students’ grades at BCC, federal prosecutors said Monday.

Cameron Lacroix, 25, a former computer information systems student who last attended BCC in the spring of 2013, is also charged with hacking into computer networks across the United States, including law enforcement agencies and a local police department, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.

He was charged Monday with two counts of computer intrusion and one count of access device fraud and has agreed to plead guilty, prosecutors said.

Lacroix faces four years in prison followed by three years of supervised release if the court accepts his plea agreement, signed Monday, according to prosecutors.

From September 2012 to December 2013, Lacroix, while a student at BCC, stole the log-in information of three instructors to access the web-based system that teachers use to record grades, according to court documents.

Lacroix, also known by his online handles of “cam0,” “Freak,” and “leetjones,” logged into the teachers’ accounts about 24 times and changed course grades for himself and two other BCC students on seven separate occasions, court records said. He also offered to change grades “for at least two additional BCC students.”

In September 2012, he accessed a computer server operated by “a local Massachusetts police department” and went through the chief’s email account, according to court documents. He copied and kept copies of the chief’s emails.

From about August through November 2012, he repeatedly accessed law enforcement computer servers, which contained police and intelligence reports, arrest warrants and sex offender information, prosecutors said.

The local police department and the local police chief are not identified in court papers, and Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office, said it is not public information at this time.

From May 2011 to May 2013, Lacroix obtained stolen payment card data for more than 14,000 unique account holders, according to court records. In some cases, he also obtained other stolen “personally identifiable information,” including the account holders’ full names, addresses, dates of births, Social Security numbers, email addresses, bank accounts and routing numbers and lists of merchandise items the account holders had ordered.

Sally Cameron, a spokeswoman at BCC, said Lacroix was a student there for three semesters — the fall semesters of 2008 and 2012 and the spring semester of 2013 — as a computer information systems student.

“It’s distressing, certainly,” she said of the grade changing. “The integrity of our information system is critically important.”

When the FBI contacted BCC, the school immediately tightened its business practices, she said. “We hope we have made it impossible for this to happen again. That’s our goal,” she said.

Behzad Mirhashem, Lacroix’s public defender who signed his client’s plea agreement, did not return two phone calls to his office on Monday.