Neat Screen Savers hacking challenge (1 Viewer)

[Greg*go]

The Screen Savers challenged anyone of their viewers to try to hack into one of their computers on the show this evening. They installed XP, updated it with Service Pack 2 (turning on XP's firewall & making sure it's up to date with critical downloads)... and that's it. No other firewalls, or any other means of protecting the computer. The link even gives you the IP address of the computer they want you to hack, and tells you what they want you to do to prove you got into the PC.

The fellas on the show say they always get questions about how secure a regular home PC is, so they decided to do this. I know they announced this in the first 10 minutes of the show, and at the end of the episode no one was able to do anything to it yet.

It's a pretty neat challenge, and after reading about all the negatives about SP2 here, I figured this article would be worth mentioning. I'm guessing the PC is hacked by tomorrows show. If it's not, then I guess that means Windows is more secure then most people realize. I look forward to seeing the results on the show tomorrow (technically today since it's past midnight on the east coast).

 

[Scott L]

Haha nice thread. Please update us on when or if it gets hacked. I have no clue how to go about doing it but I'll get warm fuzzies if it takes the hackers a while.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

The problem, of course, is that a large majority of vunerabilites in Windows are related to the ability to get the shell to execute evil code and compromise the system that way.

Of late, a good number of vunerabilities related to IE integration which allows bad code to compromise the system or email viruses targeting integrated macro features of Microsoft office and outlook products.

I think that it tells us very little to declare that a computer that is sitting idle is "secure" - since an idle computer is essentially worthless and not an decent indicator of how a PC would be used in the 'real world.' The computer could also be made "secure" by disconnecting it from the network or, even better, shutting it off.

But if this doesn't reflect how real users are USING their machines, it doesn't offer much useful info on the security of the system.

None the less, a neat challengein terms of fun and funny. But I wouldn't say that the win system is "more secure" just because it takes hakcers a month to hack the sitting box.

-V

 

[Mike_J_Potter]

Its over now they had to shut down the contest. Their explanation is.

"The "Hack Our Box Challenge" is now officially over due to the security risks it posed to us and to our ISP. Please don’t attempt to break in anymore. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your interest."

Sounds like their network was getting slammed pretty hard with various scans and what not. Not to mention the ISP probably did too. This is similar to how allot of people's websites would slow to a crawl or crash due to a mention on TSS and a large number of views then going to that site.