OS X security contest ends without incident

Published: 2006-03-08


A new Mac OS X security contest reported on yesterday has ended early, but without incident.

The contest was started on March 6th in response to an article published by CNET News.com and ZDNet of a previous OS X hacking contest. The article initially failed to indicate that contest participants were given local user-level access to the system via SSH - highly unlikely in a real-world setting.

Dave Schroeder at the University of Wisconsin wrote that the test machine, which had traffic spiking to 30 Mbps, received over half a million web requests, 4000 attempted logins via SSH, and had six million events logged in less than 38 hours. Brian Rust, handling media relations for the contest, indicated that the contest was, "not an activity authorized by the UW-Madison," and the university's CIO requested it be ended prematurely. The contest ended without any compromise of the host's security.