Hacker gets high vote tally, brings film screening
By Emily Entress
If anybody thought a small school didn't have a chance in a nation-wide competition to party with movie stars, then they clearly haven't heard of Santa Clara University.
Or maybe they just never realized the capabilities of web design genius, Jason Barry. The senior is the mastermind behind Santa Clara's mysterious rise to the top in Eventful's "Your Highness" competition.
On March 21, Santa Clara ended in fourth place in competition for the world premiere of the new movie "Your Highness" on a university campus, complete with a visit from Natalie Portman, James Franco, and Danny McBride. Santa Clara was ranked among other schools such as Santa Barbara, Texas A&M, and UC Irvine.
So how did Santa Clara, with an undergraduate population of approximately 5,000 students manage to end the competition with 9,000 votes?
The answer lies in a secret weapon: a network of bots created by Barry to automatically submit votes on behalf of Santa Clara students. Barry found a loophole in Eventful's website code that allowed him to essentially hack their system.
"They didn't have a captcha, which is designed to prevent automation, and they didn't send confirmation emails, so I thought to myself that making a bot is definitely possible," said Barry.
Although his first "bot," or program, required him to manually enter the html address to get the vote, Barry quickly created an updated version of the bot that automatically created unique Santa Clara email addresses and used them to vote for Santa Clara in the competition.
"One person doing this wasn't enough, you know, I had to distribute it," said Barry. "I made a event on facebook and a lot of people joined, a lot more than I anticipated, people I didn't even know!"
The Facebook event, titled WINNING, quickly gathered a membership of over 700 Santa Clara students, many of whom joined based solely on word of mouth.
According to Scott Torres Merryman, he decided to join because he saw that his friends had already become members.
"There was a random e-mail circulating around on Facebook, so I joined the group," commented Merryman. "I saw a lot of it posted all over my friends statuses and stuff and thought, all right, that would be cool for us to participate in!"
Merryman, like many others who joined the group, also downloaded the bots that Barry created throughout the duration of the competition.
"We were in 100 something place when we started off, competing against 1,000 schools across the nation. Within a few days we skyrocketed to first place," beamed Barry.
On March 13, Santa Clara did indeed take the lead, winning out over the University of Illinios. In fact, by the end of the day, Santa Clara had amassed upward of 41,000 votes, approximately eight times the amount of students on campus.
Eventful eventually caught on and started deleting thousands of Santa Clara votes, as well as blocking certain SCU IP addresses, which meant that some students were no longer able to access their website.
"It became a push and pull between Eventful patching their security holes and me exploiting them," said Barry.
In the last weekend before the competition ended, Barry came out with the final version of the bot. This new bot submitted votes from what appeared to be other countries around the world, thereby circumventing the issue of having the same IP address register with each vote.
With the help of the final bot, Santa Clara finished the competition in fourth place with 9,000 votes.
The premier will be held tonight, Thursday April 7, at 9:30 p.m. at the AMC Mercado theater. Although tickets were sold out less than half an hour after the location was announced, Your Highness premieres in theaters on Friday.
Contact Emily Entress at eentress@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4596.