Higher education has been attacked by the Trump administration, but NYU has been attacked by a slightly different kind of attack. The university’s website showed up with a noticeable hacker victim Saturday morning, which caused the homepage to be tainted for hours and used to display racial slander and charts that claim to show test scores for students who broke up by race.
This hack was obviously done by someone who identified himself as a racial slander – by the way, now it’s just something that’s allowed on the platform and with a handle (reviewed here here) “@bestn*ggy”. The hacker hijacked the university’s homepage and showed the message: “On June 29, 2023, racial affirmative action in college admissions was ruled illegal. Computer n*ggy Exploitation (CNE) revealed that NYU is still going on.”
The message is followed by a purportedly displayed chart to show the average grade, ACT score and grade average for New York University applicants admitted to the university. The hacker also posted a link to the mirror of the access they gained to show the score, which was determined by the hacker as “raw data” and had personally identifiable information removed.
On X, the hacker claims that the data is “literally just raw data from NYU’s own data warehouse” and that they “released only (edited) a minimum to prove that they are breaking the law.” The hacker also claims responsibility for the breach of the University of Minnesota in 2023, which reportedly exposed millions of social security people.
The obvious claim of hackers and their racist Edgelord’s character is that NYU is somehow recognizing college students. The theory is that some students will not be admitted if they judge only based on test scores and GPA. The worst accounts you know on X have mastered this, and they have used data to show that NYU has been prioritizing students in competition-based settings.
Of course, the data simply didn’t prove this. New York University (NYU) is a testing college, so the person who submits the test scores first is self-selected and will submit scores if they think it might help them. Likewise, scores cannot explain the wealth differences that plague standardized tests, as children of wealthy people largely outperform students from low-income families, largely due to the resources available to them.
(It’s the whole idea, with diversity, fairness and inclusion programs, hackers like this look so offensive – there are extremely capable people from all backgrounds who usually don’t have the same chances as others and end up being ignored.)
In any case, NYU released its own data on its upcoming class, indicating the decline in its historically underrepresented minority minorities after the Supreme Court decided to terminate affirmative action in college admissions.
It can be said that hackers and those who hold his data are enthusiastic lovers of the rule of law. Most of them just want to punish racists in colleges, which may be fueled by the Trump administration’s own crackdown on higher education institutions.
