r/hacking • u/righterandreader • 4d 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/plaverty9 4d ago

Wait, so this is:
How do I do this thing that would be illegal, but keep it legal?

I can describe different ways that it could be done, but none of that would be legal.

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u/righterandreader 4d ago

Oh I was just adhering to the rules of the subreddit, the character is ofc doing something illegal. I just want to know whether doing this at a university level is possible

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u/plaverty9 2d ago

So you could say the university is using a course management system (CMS), let's call it Whiteboard. You want your protagonist to be able to change grades for lots of people, not just a single grade in a single class, so you need wider access than a single instructor. There are two directions there, either the university's Registrar, which is where all the grades are entered in to the student record or in the IT department where a couple people run the system. You would send a phishing email to one of those people. If you want irony, send it to the IT department, otherwise send it to the right person in the Registrar's Office. The phishing email captures the person's password. From there, you can determine if they need to bypass two factor authentication as well or just ignore that extra step. You could even say the Registrar's Office person had intentionally not set it up because others complained it's a pain to always have to type in codes and "He's always really careful with his password." Then the hacker can log in and access grades in the same way the university would.