Information Security at Hogwarts
When Dumbledore says ten points to Gryffindor, or Snape says 100 points to Slytherin, who's keeping track? There's no way each teacher goes back at the end of the day, sits down, thinks "let's see, at eleven this morning I gave ten points when what's-his-face did that thing" and writes it down. I can only assume that some ingenious witch/wizard wrote up the magical equivalent of a script/macro/slash command that records to a ledger and updates point values any time a teacher says the words "[x] points [to/from] [house]".
I'm not even a Harry Potter fan, but this brings up some serious security concerns.
To start, what information is logged?
Surely it can't be just keeping a tally of points, there must be a log of how many points added/subtracted and at least the teacher's name who submitted the change. But what else, a timestamp? Is anyone even checking why the attractive new muggle studies professor just dumped a ton of points on Hufflepuff at 3am? How about some context, why were the points given? to whom? where? Which leads to the next question...
Is it peer reviewed?
Surely teachers aren't running around unchecked. Someone must be reviewing the logs, right? Is no one asking why Snape keeps docking all these points from Gryffindor? And what happens when two teachers get into a fight, "10 points to Hufflepuff!", "Well ten points FROM Hufflepuff!", "Fine ten points TO Hufflepuff!", And so on... Is there some kind of spam protection or request limit? Do teachers get a little note saying, "we're sorry, you've exceeded the maximum points you can remove per hour, please wait an hour and try again."
What kind of authentication is there?
How do we know who submitted the point changes, voice verification? Maybe using a wand as a unique fingerprint? Perhaps magical facial recognition? There must be some way to prevent any random first year from just walking around saying "Ten points to you! Ten points to you!" And screwing up the leader boards. What's to prevent the point change magi-script being triggered when some student recalls the story of today's class and says, using their best Snape impression "then he glared at me and goes 'minus 50 points from Ravenclaw', and I almost cried!". Worse, what's to stop the points from updating when Snape himself, a teacher who is permissioned to give and take points, tells the story and says the magical phrase again in the retelling?
And if the possibility exists for accidental vulnerability, what about malicious attacks?
Is it vulnerable to spoofing?
If the point logging can't be triggered accidentally can it be purposefully triggered by a student who doesn't have permissions to add/subtract points? If it's voice recognition surely someone had the skill to impersonate a teacher or has a spell to change their voice. Wand fingerprinting? They must leave their wands unattended sometimes. What about facial recognition of some sort? Surely an enterprising student had tried a spell to look like a professor before.
These are the magical equivalent of high schoolers, we all know at some point they've collectively tried to cheat in every conceivable way. Who is protecting the integrity of the points ledger from these meddling kids?
Speaking of integrity, are there integrity checks? Input sanitation?? Backups?!?
Maybe every teacher has their own ledger and Hogwarts has implemented the first magical blockchain solution. Each ledger being a node on the magical network and using each other. But what is preventing rogue malicious nodes from jumping in (such as a student with their own notebook to use as a node), and corrupting the entire chain? WHO'S RUNNING NETWORK SECURITY? The integrity of one of the world's premier wizarding schools is at stake!
These are the burning questions that woke me up in a sweat at 2am.
Finally, since people like to have a moral to their stories, I'll leave you with this. If we can ask these questions about a fictional school for wizards, we should always be asking them about the tools used by our companies and organizations.