Homework for Sale?

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2005

Students looking for an easy way out of doing homework and writing term papers may have thought they had discovered nirvana last year with the launch of the file-sharing site bfriendly.com.

The alleged Las Vegas-based firm offered a Napsterlike site for students looking to exchange old schoolwork, for a price. The Web site claimed to provide tech support 24/7. To start, students only needed to download some software called Einstein. And teachers would never be the wiser.

However, calls to the phone number on the site's press release led to a company in San Diego that had never heard of bfriendly.com or Einstein software or bfriendly.com's alleged CTO named in the release. And for a site that promises easy accessibility, several e-mail messages sent over a period of a week went unanswered.

In addition, vulnerabilities in the bfriendly.com site's software were cited in a March cyber-security bulletin from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) (www.cert.org). Hackers can easily access users' names and passwords from the site, claims US-CERT.

There's a reason teachers come down hard on those who take an easier route to schoolwork. Usually a punishment means suspension or a poor grade. Now, cheaters might find themselves victims of a hack attack—a whole new reason to pay heed to that old adage: cheating never pays.