NYU Website Hacked to Display Racist Garbage

Higher education is already under assault by the Trump administration, but New York University got hit by a slightly different kind of attack. The university’s website fell victim to an apparent hack on Saturday morning, which resulted in the homepage being defaced for several hours and used to display racial slurs and graphs that purported to show test scores of students broken down by race.

The hack was apparently carried out by a person who identifies themselves on X as a racial slur—a thing that it just allowed on that platform now, by the way—with the handle (censored here) “@bestn*ggy.” The hacker hijacked the university’s homepage and displayed the message, “On June 29 2023, racial affirmative action in college admissions was ruled illegal. Computer N*ggy Exploitation (CNE) reveals NYU continued anyway.”

That message was followed by a graph purporting to show the average SAT scores, ACT scores, and grade point average of NYU applicants who were admitted into the university, broken down by race. The hacker also published links to mirrors of the supposed data they gained access to in order to display the scores, identified by the hacker as “raw data” with personally identifiable information redacted.

On X, the hacker claimed that the data was “literally just raw data from NYU’s own data warehouse” and that they “only posted (redacted) bare minimum to prove they’re breaking the law.” The hacker also claimed responsibility for a breach of the University of Minnesota back in 2023 that reportedly exposed millions of social security numbers.

The apparent claim being put forth by the hacker and their racist edgelord persona is that NYU is admitting college students based in some way on race. The theory being that some students would not be admitted if they were being judged based solely on their test scores and GPA. That has been picked up by the worst accounts you know on X, who have run with the data to suggest NYU has been giving preference to students based on race.

Of course, the data doesn’t prove that at all. NYU is a test-optional school, so the people who submit test results in the first place are self-selecting—they’re going to submit a score if they think it might help them. Likewise, the scores can’t account for the wealth disparity that plagues standardized testing, as the children of wealthy people significantly outperform students from lower-income households, in no small part due to the resources available to them.

(That’s kinda the whole idea with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that people like this hacker seem so offended by—there are extremely capable people from all backgrounds who often simply do not have the same opportunities as others and end up overlooked.)

Anyway, NYU posts its own data on incoming classes, and it indicated that it saw a decline in historically underrepresented minority groups for the class of 2028 following the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action within college admissions.

All of that to say, the hacker and the people who have picked up on his data are ardent lovers of the rule of law. They’re mostly just racists who want to punish universities, possibly galvanized by the Trump administration’s own crackdown on higher education institutions.