“The Internet is an enabling technology that makes all kinds of things easier to do in the spirit of the moment and with detachment from reality,” he said. “When you get reactions that are not tempered by the human side of this, that strikes me as fundamentally unfair.”

But HBS spokesman David Lampe said yesterday the school would not excuse the applicants’ actions.

“Legally, what they did was trespassing,” Lampe said. “This is an area where you know you’re not supposed to be.”

Kenneth S. Ledeen, chairman of Nevo Technologies and a teaching fellow in Quantitative Reasoning 48, “Bits,” said that, while he does not believe the applicants’ actions constituted hacking, the incident still raises difficult ethical questions.

“The reason you don’t see much of a consensus is that people don’t have a clear framework through which to view it,” Ledeen said.

—Anton S. Troianovski contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Daniel J.T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.