The union representing University of Malta academics said on Thursday a presidential pardon for a lecturer and his three students charged with hacking Malta’s largest student app FreeHour is not enough.

It urged the authorities to instead drop the charges and review the procedures that put lecturers and learners at risk.

In 2022, the students were among a group of four to inform the app’s developers of a vulnerability in the software while requesting a reward, or ‘bug bounty’ - a common practice in ethical hacking, or ‘white hat’ hacking.

Students Michael Debono, Giorgio Grigolo and Luke Bjorn Scerri stand accused of gaining unauthorised access to the app, while lecturer Mark Joseph Vella is being charged as an accomplice for proofreading the email the students sent to FreeHour.

The University of Malta Academic Staff Association (UMASA) has already expressed its “solidarity” with the group and said it believed Vella, a senior Computer Science lecturer, “acted with academic integrity when teaching his students ethical practices in testing cybersecurity”.

The government has since recommended a presidential pardon for the four.

But on Thursday UMASA said that while it was keen to see the situation resolved, it felt that resolution through pardon was "not the most satisfactory or appropriate route in the circumstances".

The pardon, UMASA added, was a short-term patch with wider implications suggesting the worrying criminalisation of lecturers in the area.

"The long-running core issue is that there remains a lack of national policies ensuring safety for those conducting cybersecurity teaching, learning and research.

"While the publishing of a National Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Policy is a step in the right direction, UMASA urges more sustained attention to the ongoing and systemic problems, rather than the deus ex machina approach taken so far, which has been to see it as an isolated incident that can be summarily dispelled and washed away by the exceptional use of discretionary power, without addressing the legally complex processes."