Garfield High Student Suspended For Hacking -- He Broke Into Minn. System, School Officials Say

A Garfield High School student has been suspended for using a school computer to hack his way into a Minnesota public-library computer system, Seattle school officials said.

The 16-year-old student, whose identity was not released, has not been charged with a crime.

Officials for the Ramsey County, Minn., Library System, which serves the St. Paul area, said the hacker entered their system last Thursday afternoon, left a message and re-entered the system later the same day.

That system's computer did not crash because of the entry and was not damaged. Earlier reports mistakenly had said the intrusion to the system had caused it to crash.

Authorities in Minnesota were able to trace the hacker back to the Garfield computer lab and then notified the school.

The Minnesota hacking followed two similar computer break-ins of the King County Library System. That hacking cost the system more than $200,000 in repairs and overtime and is being investigated by the Seattle Police fraud unit.

Technicians at a library-software company that serves both library systems this week examined computer addresses to determine if the vandal who crashed the King County system's computers last month could be the same person who hacked the Minnesota system, a company spokesman said.

Wilson Raj of Ameritech Library Services, the company that makes the Dynix software used by both systems, said a link had not been established between the two cases.

Garfield Principal Ammon McWashington this week said his staff members were reviewing which students were in the computer lab last Thursday and were considering restricting use of the lab.

By Tuesday, they had narrowed to one the number of students in the lab at the time of the Ramsey County entry and confronted the student.