An unidentified hacker helped hundreds of applicants attempt to gain access to admissions decisions from the country’s top business schools Wednesday, including the Fuqua School of Business. But while some applicants at other schools were successful in viewing decision information, Fuqua’s separate database and firewall systems thwarted such access at Duke.
The hacker, using the pseudonym “brookbond,” posted hacking instructions on an online forum at Business Week’s website early Wednesday. The post, which told applicants how to access confidential admissions decisions weeks ahead of schedule, affected several dozen business schools, including Fuqua and those at Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Dartmouth College. All of the affected schools use ApplyYourself, a Fairfax, Va.-based company that specializes in online admissions application systems.
“When it was decided to use ApplyYourself, Duke decided that [admissions decisions] would be kept separate from the ApplyYourself website,” said Chris Cramer, information technology security officer. “All of the information is kept locally until it is time to release it. It’s very tightly monitored.”
Because Duke keeps admissions decisions on a secure internal server separate from the ApplyYourself database, the one applicant who attempted to hack Fuqua’s system was unable to access any admissions decision information. The next round of admissions decisions is scheduled to be released March 24.
Some schools—such as Harvard, which had more than 100 attempted applicant hacks—did not keep the application information and admissions information on two separate systems, and applicants were able to view available decisions.
“We are backslapping with our IT people today,” Jim Gray, associate dean of marketing and communications at Fuqua, said Friday. “We’re congratulating them on that today.”
While officials, both at Fuqua and other business schools, have remained mum on whether applicants who attempted to access the information would be ultimately rejected, all indicated that the move would raise a flag on their applications.
“[This incident] won’t be positive,” Gray said. “His application has not been finally acted on, but it’s clear that this incident will have a negative impact on his application.”
The name and e-mail address of the applicant who attempted to illegally access his Fuqua decision information has been turned over to the Office of Information Technology, Gray said.
“I can’t really speak to the specifics of this case. However, it is important to note that because of the way we were using ApplyYourself with the secondary system, the student did not actually see the confidential information,” Cramer said. “Any grievance would be by the ApplyYourself company.”
ApplyYourself CEO Len Metheny told The Associated Press that applicants were only able to view their own personal admissions information. Some schools had not yet reached admissions decisions on the candidates, meaning they were unable to see if they had been admitted. Most business schools, including Fuqua, conduct admissions for their daytime MBA programs in multiple rounds.
“There were only a small number of students who actually had a decision,” Metheny said. “For the vast majority of applicants, decisions were not available in the system to be displayed. A blank page would appear.”
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