Victoria Secret competition gets hacked

It was too good to be true.

With more than 5 million votes registered, Drexel University had overwhelmed the Victoria's Secret online poll to become the first school to be added to the Pink Collegiate Collection.

The nearest competition - Texas Tech and George Mason University -trailed behind Drexel by at least two million votes.

Except a majority of the votes from Drexel, and many of the other top 25 schools in the poll, were generated by computer programs.

"Another computer science major and I had found the Facebook group promoting the contest and .we thought it would be funny," said Drexel junior Tim Plunkett.

In the early hours of Oct. 21, Plunkett and his friend created a Perl script that could log 1,500 votes per second on the Victoria's Secret Web site. Twelve hours later, Drexel had gone from 9,000 to 5.2 million votes.

The script took Plunkett all of three minutes and 30 computers to run.

"We're good at what we do."

Plunkett had noticed the lax security surrounding the poll. Other schools noticed, too.

Travis Taylor, a senior at Texas Tech University, said these types of online polls are hard to make secure.

Like Plunkett, he wrote a program that automatically added votes for his school.

"On-line web security is kind of a hobby I guess," he said.

Soon, Taylor and Plunkett found other technophiles who were trying to bypass the poll security system on Facebook and other forums.

Though the various programmers initially exchanged ideas, rivalries arose over who could write the fastest script, especially between Drexel and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"It turned into a thing where we were all seeing who could write the best script . but none of the leading schools really cared," said George Mason freshman Collin Petty.

Finally, Victoria's Secret took notice - and blocked the top five schools from voting after a mass attack from MIT crashed the Web site.

Faced with this dilemma, MIT students got creative.

"The MIT kids thought 'hell if we cant vote for ourselves we'll vote for someone else,'" said Michael, an MIT sophomore who preferred his last name not be used because he participated in the scheme.

"Luckily at MIT we are motivated by the ridiculous to do this kind of thing," he said.

A student created a script to vote for random schools and sent it to MIT students.

In no more than two days, Wellesley and Zion Bible College rocketed to the top of the list.

"Right after that, Victoria's Secret ended up blocking MIT entirely so we couldn't access the site," Michael said.

According to Taylor, most of Zion Bible College's votes came from him. He also wrote a script for Virginia Tech.

"I was looking at their little Facebook group supporting their school, and they had been working really hard . so I voted for them so they wouldn't feel too bad."

Victoria's Secret has now implemented a new security system that lets users vote only once a day, and has a warning: "Tech schools, we're watching your votes!"

The company did not return calls for comment.

Many still see flaws in the system, although the novelty has warn off for most of the script creators.

"Corporations in general need to take online security seriously," Plunkett said.

"They've already added a bunch of security again but its not done correctly so could be messed with again," Taylor said.

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