Case Study 2
Case Study 2: Hacking into Harvard
Naugie Pratt
Unit 2
October 2, 2012
Case Study 2: Hacking into Harvard
Summary of Events:
This case involves students who have applied to MBA programs, who stumbled across an opportunity to learn of their results early, information that had been obtained via message board. Anyone who has ever applied for admission to a prestigious college, or who has been interview for a desired job knows the feeling of playing the “wait game”. However in this case, applicants waiting for the results of application and interviews into MBA programs offered at –Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Stanford were able to take a glimpse of whether their destiny has been fulfilled or not. While visiting a Business Week Online message board, thy found instructions, posted by an anonymous hacker explaining the “how to” find out what admission decision the business schools has made on their behalf, of being accepted or rejected. (pp 86-87) Doing so wasn’t hard because all the schools use the same application software known as, “ Apply Yourself, Inc.”, all one had to do was change the very end of the application specific URL to get to the supposedly restricted page containing the outcome on one’s application. It too all of nine hours for “Apply Yourself” programmers to figure out what went wrong, before they were able to patch the security flaw within their system, after the message was posted. But curiosity got the better of about two hundred applicants, who couldn’t resist the temptation to discover whether they had been admitted or not.
Ethical Issues:
In order to develop leaders in this world, these leaders need to have principles that they oblige by in order to achieve such goals, to include the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment and a strong moral compass. An intuitive sense of what is morally right vs. wrong, in this case the applicants who hacked into the website failed to pass such test, lack of
Naugie Pratt
Unit 2
October 2, 2012
Case Study 2: Hacking into Harvard
Summary of Events:
This case involves students who have applied to MBA programs, who stumbled across an opportunity to learn of their results early, information that had been obtained via message board. Anyone who has ever applied for admission to a prestigious college, or who has been interview for a desired job knows the feeling of playing the “wait game”. However in this case, applicants waiting for the results of application and interviews into MBA programs offered at –Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Stanford were able to take a glimpse of whether their destiny has been fulfilled or not. While visiting a Business Week Online message board, thy found instructions, posted by an anonymous hacker explaining the “how to” find out what admission decision the business schools has made on their behalf, of being accepted or rejected. (pp 86-87) Doing so wasn’t hard because all the schools use the same application software known as, “ Apply Yourself, Inc.”, all one had to do was change the very end of the application specific URL to get to the supposedly restricted page containing the outcome on one’s application. It too all of nine hours for “Apply Yourself” programmers to figure out what went wrong, before they were able to patch the security flaw within their system, after the message was posted. But curiosity got the better of about two hundred applicants, who couldn’t resist the temptation to discover whether they had been admitted or not.
Ethical Issues:
In order to develop leaders in this world, these leaders need to have principles that they oblige by in order to achieve such goals, to include the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment and a strong moral compass. An intuitive sense of what is morally right vs. wrong, in this case the applicants who hacked into the website failed to pass such test, lack of
References: Shaw, W. H., & Barry, V (2010), Moral Issues in Business (10th Ed.) Belmont CA; Wadsworth, Cengage Learning An Assessment of Morality by Ethicsinbusiness.net http://www.ehow.com/info_7755222_ethical-lapses.html article by Rosyln Frenz, retrieved 2012