How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
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Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#2Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.
Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#3Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.
A 'neat hack' is the original use of the word hack. Hacking does not at all require the involvement of vulnerabilities.
Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#4Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.
Eh, I haven't read the article but I'm pretty sure hacking is doing something outside its intended purpose.
Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#5Burp is probably the better tool for the job in most cases since you're usually just looking to repeat a request until you get the response you're looking for.
If you just want to automate registration to ensure you get a seat in a course you should be looking into your school's network topology to minimize latency.
Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#6Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.
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Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#7Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.
I'd be worried if it was actually about "hacking", because the result is usually very severe. Universities are still quite backwards went it comes to security unfortunately.
Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#8Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.
It's also a bit risky, as some University administrators may not understand that he isn't actually being malicious. Automated scraping can be considered a violation of some IT policies though, so OP should be careful about something like this.
Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#9This is an interesting proof of concept. I'm impressed at how simple the SMS signup code is.
For many universities though, it won't be this simple. Many hide the open seats behind a login, which means you need to be a student there to see them. Many also use student information systems that are a real pain to scrape like this. Once you get to the point where interacting with the student information system is done via AJAX requests mediated by a mess of JavaScript, it starts to push the limits of what you can do with this technique.
When it gets to this point you either have to carefully dissect everything on the Network tab of your developer tools, or use a real browser. I've used PhantomJS (basically a headless WebKit) and Selenium WebDriver with great success on sites that are not amenable to scraping. The neat thing is that you really only need to use that for the interaction to get to where the information is. Once you've navigated there you can just have it dump the rendered page as HTML and parse it using the same techniques shown here.
Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
#10Probably the word "hacked" made it click baity, atleast in my opinion. Automation, yes. Not sure there was a vulnerability involved.
Eh, I haven't read the article but I'm pretty sure hacking is doing something outside its intended purpose.
Agreed, but it's just automation at play here. Clever, and will save time though, just thought that the headline was a little misleading, considering a registration system was involved.