Three boys accessed the computer system in early December, viewed information on it, then bragged about their conquest on MySpace.com, a social networking Web service popular among teens that provides a place for personal profiles, photos and open discussions.

A fellow student saw the bragging and notified school officials, who contacted police, Central Point Police Detective Josh Moulin said.

Moulin, the department’s one-man high-tech crime unit, combined the school’s record of people who had tapped into its system with data from the MySpace site to identify the home computers used to visit both sites. He tracked down the teens, who confessed in interviews that they had broken into the school’s computer system, but hadn’t changed any information.

The three boys were referred to Jackson County Juvenile Justice, where they will face misdemeanor charges of committing a computer crime.

Unauthorized access to a computer system is the lowest level of computer crime, Moulin explained. Changing or damaging the system or using it for monetary gain boosts the seriousness of the crime, which can be a felony in the worst cases.

Moulin said the new high-tech crime unit was set up for just this sort of case, as well as more serious matters. Without the unit’s technology and expertise, criminal charges would have been unlikely in this case, he said.