Hacker Claims Responsibility for Replacing NYU’s Website With Apparent Test Scores

A dark web user claimed responsibility for briefly hacking New York University’s website Saturday, and replacing it with what appeared to be student test scores and an apparent racial epithet.

Instead of the usual images of college athletes and the Greenwich Village campus, the site featured a black background with green writing showing a message along with charts of what were purported to be SAT and ACT scores and GPAs for students in 2024, divided by race.

The NYU website has been hacked.

This is its main page right now: A graph showing the discrepancies between the mean SAT scores of different racial groups, highlighted by the massive difference between Asians (1485) and blacks (1289) — a nearly 200-point difference. pic.twitter.com/eIFjChZWUU

— i/o (@alkonata) March 22, 2025

The site was reclaimed after approximately two hours, and back to normal by 12:54 p.m.

“On June 29 2023, racial affirmative action in college admissions was ruled illegal,” the female hacker’s message reads. “Computer N–gy Exploitation (CNE) reveals NYU continued anyway.”

The compromised site also featured downloadable files containing all of the hacked data.

It was unclear if the hacker, who goes by the name “@bestn–gy” on X, also gained unauthorized access to the university’s database.

“It’s literally just raw data from NYU’s own data warehouse,” the hacker explained in a post. “I just put in some bar graphs.”

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