The Georgia Tech student who faced a felony computer trespass charge for hacking into the University of Georgia’s online calendar and posting the phrase “Get ass kicked by GT” in the days before the two schools met in 2014 for their annual football game took to social media earlier this week, calling his brush with the law “a huge learning experience” and saying he hoped his experience “spreads awareness about the possible repercussions of cyber pranks.”
Ryan Pickren was indicted by a grand jury within a few weeks of his successful hack, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest on Dec. 22, 2014. Pickren, then spending the Christmas holidays with his family at their Florida home, was driven to Athens by his father to turn himself in, and was released after posting a $5,700 bond.
Represented by Athens attorney Ed Tolley, Pickren was accepted into the local judicial circuit’s pretrial diversion program in an order signed by Superior Court Judge Lawton Stephens. As part of the program, Pickren was required to perform 80 hours of community service, stay out of trouble for 12 months, and write a letter of apology to the university. Upon successful completion of the program, access to Pickren’s record would be restricted, according to a Clarke County Superior Court document.
In a lengthy message posted to Facebook on Wednesday, with all of the legal sanctions imposed on him having been satisfied, Pickren — a computer engineering student who wrote he discovered a “passion for cyber security” during his studies — said the idea for the hack come to him on Thanksgiving Day while he was at home in Florida.
“Growing up with a Georgia Tech alum for a grandfather,” Pickren wrote, “I heard [about] all sorts of rivalry pranks ... . While sitting in my room waiting for Thanksgiving dinner, I decided that I was going to play a prank of my own. I pulled up the University of Georgia’s homepage and started poking around.” Looking at the calendar page, Pickren wrote, he “had a hunch that I could circumvent their approval process” for posting items on the calendar.
He tried, and succeeded, in getting into the calendar, and “in shock that it actually worked,” Pickren wrote, “I ran downstairs to show my parents what I had done. ... My family laughed and gave me high fives.”
During the evening, though, Pickren was on his computer and found out an ESPN reporter discovered the hack and written about it on Twitter, and the story spread across the media from there.
A few weeks later, Pickren said, he was contacted by a UGA police detective.
“I was in shock,” he wrote. “I didn’t even know this could be considered illegal. ... I just found a bug in their site that allowed my seemingly harmless prank.”
Then came the warrant, Pickren said, and along with it, wider attention from the media.
“I went from being a normal college student to being compared to North Korean hackers in the New York Times,” he wrote. But, he added, “oddly enough job offers started flowing in.”
Pickren, who thanked the district attorney’s office for offering the option of the pretrial diversion program, said he did his community service with TechBridge, an Atlanta based nonprofit organization that provides technical support to other nonprofit groups.
“While volunteering,” he wrote, “I developed security tools to help them protect their clients from hackers.”