source : the age
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has confirmed its website was hacked on Wednesday evening, but says there is no evidence that the hacker accessed this year’s exam papers as they have claimed.
At about 6pm, 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 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 then claimed the success of this year’s program would allow them to start selling exams for 2027 much earlier.
In a statement, VCAA confirmed its site had been hacked, and it was now investigating how extensive the hack was.
“There is no indication that exam papers from today or previous weeks have been accessed,” it said in a statement.
Several VCE students and parents contacted The Age after discovering the hacker’s message. One of them, David Charlesworth, has a daughter in her final year who was alerted to the message by her 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 Smith 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 are set to be released on December 10.
More to come
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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.
