THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The teacher in the computer science department at St John’s Model Higher Secondary School, Nalanchira, was struggling to find an intruder who continuously disrupted their online classroom sessions.
To their rescue came one of their former students, Aswaghosh Syndhav, who is now pursuing BCA in Christ Nagar College in the capital city. The cyber enthusiast with digital knowledge tracked the intruder — a student from another school in the city.
Aswaghosh was known as a tech geek in his school. Though he had only studied classes XI and XII in the school, he was known among the staff for his way of navigating the IT world.
When principal, Fr. Jose Cheruvil along with teachers shared their worry about intruders, Aswaghosh turned up as little Sherlock Holmes to solve the issue without any hassle.
He only took two nights and one day to trace the online trespasser.
“It happened last month. An intruder kept disrupting the online class for two days continuously. He kept passing bad comments and interrupting the class with dance videos wearing masks. The classes were on Google Workspace, which enables access to the login data of every user. But the intruder used his fake email ids for the purpose. He had eight such fake ids. We blocked him multiple times and due to his confidence, he finally used his original id to log in. I traced him with his id name on Instagram and finally found his real identity through his followers,” he adds.
Aswaghosh shared the identity of the intruder with the teachers.
“He was a student from another government school in the city. If not found, he would have continued this practice and later may have moved on to much larger crimes. I wish to pursue a career in cyber security in future,” says Aswaghosh, who was also part of the corporation’s Covid help desk.
Fr Jose Cheruvilsays, Aswagosh used his IT knowledge to better society.
“He is not a top student academically. But the way he used his knowledge and applied it to solve a problem is praiseworthy. It is the real meaning of education. We are proud of him,” he says.