HARRIS COUNTY, Texas – A Texas high schooler is accused of using his school computer to orchestrate a cyberattack across the district that disrupted state testing for thousands of students.
Police are looking for 18-year-old Keontra Lamont Kenemore who went to Klein Forest School about half an hour north of Houston until this happened.
Kenemore accessed sites that initiated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on his school-issued Chromebook, causing major internet disruptions during mandatory state testing last month, according to court documents.
When the testing coordinator at his high school started having internet issues during the testing period, the IT department investigated and found the district was experiencing a DDoS attack.
“This is like pulling the fire alarm in all schools in the Klein ISD school district at the same time and continuously for a number of hours,” said Nigel Neilsen, who owns the IT company Nickel Idealtek Inc.
The internet disruptions affected every school in the district and about 24,000 students over a three-day testing period.
“This is a really easy attack to perform. It probably only cost him about $20,” Neilsen said. “Literally, you can do it in about five minutes.”
When school administrators questioned Kenemore, they say he admitted accessing the websites used to send the DDoS attacks on multiple occasions.
Neilsen compared the attack to a flash mob filling a restaurant, with no intention of dining or buying, leaving those who want to eat there unable to because it’s full.
“(Users) would have had timeout notices on the web browser. It would have been a 404 error saying, ‘Oh, sorry, something has gone wrong’,” he said. “This would have been a deliberate action because he utilized two different tools in order to identify the public IP address of the school district and then he would have had to manually copy and paste that into the attacking website,” he said.
At Kenemore’s current address, no one came to the door on Monday evening, but a family member told Houston NBC affiliate KPRC 2′s over the phone that Kenemore said it was an accident, that he was expelled and unable to graduate.
Investigators claim it was intentional in court records.
Klein ISD has not responded to requests for comment or answered any questions about the cyberattack.