Daedong High School in Gwangju / Yonhap

Two high school students in the southwestern city of Gwangju are under investigation after being caught hacking into their teachers' notebook computers to steal exam papers, police and municipal education officials said Wednesday.

The two unnamed second-year students of Daedong High School in Gwangju, 330 kilometers south of Seoul, are accused of breaking into the teachers' room at night before hacking into the laptop computers, and stealing midterm and final exam papers as well as answers this year.

The students reportedly told police and school officials that they had committed the misdeed to improve their grades by any means to get into their desired universities.

Separately from the police probe, the two students will likely face disciplinary punishment, such as expulsion from the school, education officials said.

According to investigators at the Gwangju Seobu Police Station, the two students first drew up plans to steal school exam papers and answers from their teachers' laptops in January this year.

One of the two students, who is said to be good at programming, used his coding skills learned in school and hacking methods learned on the internet to make his own malware capable of stealing internal information from laptops. The malware was reportedly programmed to periodically capture and save screens when installed onto a laptop.

Then the students were surprised to find their school's crime prevention and security systems far poorer than expected, police said.

Closed-circuit TVs installed on campus were not covering the teachers' room, and a private security company's alarm system did not detect the intruders. The windows of the teachers' room were not locked properly, and school guards failed to find the two students who sneaked into the school compound several times at night prior to the midterm and final exams.

Each teacher's laptop had a password, but one of the students simply cracked the laptop passwords using a method that he found through an internet search.

After the teachers completed the exam questions and answers, the students again broke into the teachers' room to move the captured files to their USB devices and completely delete their malware.

But the two students' crimes came to light accidently due to their poor management of the stolen exam answers.

One of the two, who could not memorize all the answers, secretly wrote down the answers on a slip of paper, tore it into pieces after the exam and threw it in the trash can, which was witnessed by a suspicious classmate. (Yonhap)