source : the age
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) has confirmed its website was hacked on Wednesday evening, but maintains there is no evidence to support claims that this year’s VCE exam papers were accessed or stolen.
About 6pm on Wednesday, a message laced with profanities appeared on VCAA’s homepage, authored by someone using the alias “DaggerElite”, claiming to have hacked the site and sold VCE exams to “hundreds of students statewide”.
The hacker further claimed they had breached the security of not only VCAA, but the authority’s external printing providers, from which they had downloaded the VCE exams. They did not name the provider in the message.
The hacker then claimed to have sent the exams to the students via an email address belonging to a law firm, whose system they said they also hacked.
“The success of their campaign could not have been possible without all their help together,” they wrote with mock gratitude.
The hacker also claimed the “hundreds of students statewide” who participated in the scheme this year would allow them to start selling papers for 2027 “well in advance”.
However, VCAA chief executive Andrew Smith reiterated on Thursday morning that there was currently no evidence to substantiate the claims.
Speaking to ABC Radio Melbourne, Smith said the authority had been working overnight to establish whether any exam materials had been compromised.
“The claims that they were downloaded from our secure printers don’t stand up at this stage,” he said.
“The likelihood that an exam could get out in the way that it’s been claimed is very, very low.”
Smith said the VCAA was working to restore its website as a “matter of urgency”, but could not provide a definite timeframe.
“Once we’ve completed our investigation, we will go back, look at the root cause of what might have happened, and any changes we need to increase the security around our corporate website will certainly be made,” he said.
On Wednesday evening, the VCAA confirmed its site had been the “subject of vandalism”, but an initial investigation had shown no evidence that sensitive data or exam papers had been accessed.
“There is no indication that exam papers from today or previous weeks have been accessed,” the authority said in a statement. It also confirmed VCE exams would continue as normal and the incident had been reported to Victoria Police.
The website remained largely blank several hours after the hack, with a message telling visitors it was “undergoing maintenance”.
On Wednesday evening, GoAhead lawyers said they suspected its email address had been spoofed by a third party. Email spoofing is the creation of an email with a forged sender address.
Principal lawyer Sukhwinder Singh said his firm had not authorised any emails distributing VCE papers.
“Our checks so far have found no record of the reported emails in our systems, and we cannot confirm that they were sent from a Go Ahead Lawyers account,” Singh said in a statement.
Singh said he had reported the suspected spoofing to VCAA and will assist with its inquiries.
Several VCE students and parents contacted The Age after discovering the hacker’s message. One of them, David Charlesworth, said his daughter was in her final year and had been alerted to the message by friends.
Charlesworth said even if the hacker was lying about selling exams, the hack itself was reason enough to worry and said it made it hard for him to have confidence in the system.
“They’ve been through this before,” he said of VCAA. “They can do a better job.”
“Students are very upset about this,” said another parent on social media. “Some still have exams to go.”
The hack comes two years after the government ordered a review into the 2024 exam period after VCAA unintentionally published 56 test papers that gave thousands of students an advantage over others.
VCAA’s then-chief executive Kylie White resigned after the bungle, before the board was sacked in 2025.
There were also errors in papers in the 2022 and 2023 exam periods.
Education Minister Gabrielle Williams was contacted for comment.
The Coalition’s education spokesperson Brad Roswell said he had sought a briefing from the department and VCAA.
The 2026 VCE exam period still has a week to run, concluding with language exams on November 18.
Results will be released on December 10.
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Alexander Darling is a breaking news reporter at The Age. He has previously worked at the ABC, as well as Horsham’s Wimmera Mail-Times and Triple M radio stations in NSW.Connect via email.
