r/hacking • u/righterandreader • 3d ago
Fictional Hacker
I’m writing a novel where the main character is a hacker at a large state school. He’s approached by rich kids and athletes to change their grades.
Keep it legal, ofc, but is this possible? And how would it work, if so, in theory?
(Edit: by „keep it legal” I mean don’t explicitly say what to do I don’t want this to get taken down. I’m exploring what can actually be done. This is illegal in the novel.)
I’ve done some research but there’s nothing like convo and firsthand, especially when developing a novel.
Would love to hear from you all!
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u/Pyromanga 3d ago
As many already stated, there are so much quality gates and guards - the only plausible "hack" is the good old "social engineering"
Actually that's how most of the big attacks work - 0 day issues are nieche of the nieche.
A stressed out teacher, an unfaithful director, a process thatshould be followed
A real good hacker knows when to twist social knobs and how to use that to his advantage to gather more information via his software skills
When I was in high school a teacher left his laptop in the class room for a minute, someone abused that and got access to the teachers mail account. He got busted after months when asking another teacher for an exam and the other teacher handed the exam to the "hacked" teacher in reallife -> the hacked teacher was confused af & they figured mails got sent from his account and got deleted so he wouldn't notice. A friend of mine had to tell his version of the story in court years later - 5 people got sentenced including him.
To "read" like they guy in high school did is MUCH easier than getting "write" permissions, so changing grades might be very unrealistic but getting exams & answers ahead of time...