Read the full blog post: https://kylewade.dev/blog/reverse-engineering-ucsd-parking-ticket-system

What is this?

This is a scraping program which took advantage of a loophole with the University of California, San Diego's (UCSD) parking ticket system. By reverse engineering how citation numbers in parking tickets were calculated, a user is able to look up new parking tickets in UCSD's system via webscraping new predicted citation numbers. This resulted in a website which tracked the locations of parking tickets being issued on campus in real time, totaling $56,900 in 7 days. Eventually, UCSD was notified of this exploit and patched it in their system.

Codebase structure

• /database contains the PostgreSQL database schema, which can be self hosted via Supabase
• /scraper contains the webscraping program which scrapes parking tickets from UCSD's system using Selenium Chromedriver
• /website contains the Next.js website which is used to display parking tickets stored in the database

Have some questions?

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