Hacking Cooper Union

During college, I was able to hack into and directly access my school's alumni database.

Upon gaining access, I scraped all alumni records and amassed a list of every alumni who had graduated from Cooper Union since 1941. I then enriched these alumni profiles with linkedin accounts, emails, social media contacts, github accounts, friends of friends, etc. and then sold these alumni records to fellow students so they could reach out to alumni for summer internships/full-time job offers.

I used my college's email system to mass solicit my product, sending several thousand automated emails over the course of a couple of days (staggering the automated scheduler so as not to trigger any alarms). This resulted in hundreds of students signing up, several paying for my service, and many received quality internships/jobs for that upcoming summer.

Eventually when Cooper Union administration found out, they sent me a cease and desist letter and threatened to suspend me. After a series of disciplinary meetings with the Deans, when I wouldn't stop, they then escalated by threatening to permanently expel me. So eventually I did stop.