A former student at a Connecticut high school has been charged with computer crimes after he hacked into the school’s system and changed to two students yearbook quotations, one to a a quote attributed to Adolf Hitler and the other to mention one of the Boston Marathon bombers.
The New York Times reports that 18-year-old Hollister Tryon was arrested last week and charged with two counts of third-degree computer crimes for hacking into the systems at Glastonbury High School in Connecticut, changing the quotes that were published in the yearbook in October.
Police allege Tryon changed one person’s quote to one frequently, though falsely, attributed to Hitler and cited its source as George Floyd, a Minneapolis man killed by police officers in May 2020. He changed another to include a reference to drugs and a reference to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people.
Tryon told police he was encouraged to submit quotes to the yearbook in the names of other students while he was on Discord, a social media site for gamers. He said he chose the two students at random from a list of known user names and passwords he had gained access to. It is unclear how he obtained that list.
The school stopped distribution of the 300 yearbooks purchased and recalled them from students. They also have purchased replacements which will be delivered by the yearbook’s publisher with the quotations corrected.