Hackers fail ethics entry test

Some applicants to top US business schools have been barred after hacking into the institutions' computers, writes Jon Marcus.

The 200 or so applicants hacked into a software program that allowed them to peek at whether they had been accepted to graduate business schools at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke and Stanford universities. Harvard, MIT and Carnegie Mellon announced that they would bar the hackers from their institutions.

All the universities use the same application software, which turned out to be relatively easy to breach, especially after someone posted the instructions online.

"Our mission is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world," said Kim Clark, the dean of Harvard Business School. He said that required "the highest standards of integrity, sound judgement and a strong moral compass - an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this website failed to pass that test."