B-schools may rescind offers following hacks

As thousands of prospective students endure the final weeks of anticipation before admissions decisions are revealed, several hundred graduate students decided to take matters into their own hands.

Some of these students used illegal online resources to gain access to admissions Web sites before the decisions were released, and in many cases their impatience has cost them potential admittance.

Early last week, someone using the alias "Brookbond" posted instructions on a BusinessWeek message board on how to gain access to the admissions-decision Web sites of several prominent graduate business programs, including those at Harvard, Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth.

After the hacking instructions were posted, several hundred applicants to these schools found either a blank page or their preliminary decision on the Web site during the approximately nine-hour window that the sites were open.

Approximately 119 Harvard applicants and 41 Stanford applicants hacked in to the respective Web sites. The other schools did not release specific numbers.

Since second-round admissions decisions are not usually available until the end of the month, some of these schools have decided to punish people who attempted to view their decision early by denying them admission to the school.

Wharton was not among the schools affected in the incident.

"I can't judge the actions of other schools, but I am personally in agreement with their stance to fit what was done by these students," said Anjani Jain, the Vice Dean and Director of Wharton's Graduate Division said.

So far, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon have announced that everyone who hacked into the system has been rejected from the school.

Len Metheny, the chief executive officer of the company that created the admissions software for these schools -- ApplyYourself, Inc. -- told The Boston Globe that it was the first incident of its kind that the company had experienced.

"We still remain confident that it is a secure system," Metheny said.

In addition to the business schools that were affected, more than 400 undergraduate admissions programs buy software from ApplyYourself.

However, Methany believes that these were not affected since the window was open for a short period of time and the notice from "Brookbond" was posted on BusinessWeek's Web site, which is frequented primarily by business school students.

For Penn students, these developments do not pose a problem, as the school utilizes different software for its admissions process.

"We don't believe we're vulnerable to an attack like the one on ApplyYourself since we don't use their program," University Information Security Officer David Millar said.

In addition, Millar noted that Penn has not had a problem with people being able to hack into its admissions decisions site in the past and does not foresee it being a problem in the future.

Although the third round of the application process for the Wharton MBA program is currently under way, school officials do not believe that the rejection of people from the other schools will drastically impact the number of applicants.

"Most of the process is already under way; only the small third round is left," Jain said. "I don't anticipate a change in the application process or numbers."

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