LinuxPPC Challenge: Crack the Box and Keep it!

Jeff Carr from LinuxPPC was so amused by yesterday's MS W2k crack challange that he figured he'd play too: By setting up a LinuxPPC box challanging the adept out there to get in... but if you can get in, you get to keep the box! Its a stock LinuxPPC install, and he even left telnet on. The url is crack.linuxppc.org. You must be able to reproduce your entry to win. Have fun.

You break it, you keep it.

Sounds suspiciously like a contest I run everyday when I bike to work. It's called "break the bike lock and keep the bike!".

SirSlud

A very good idea to route back the efforts, indeed

Kudos to the PPC guys.

No better way to detract from the interest that
Microsoft may have generated than to divert back the efforts of the linux community to a more
worthy cause - improving the security of our own systems.

Let's eat our own (dog)food.

Arieh

This could turn into "King of the Hill"

The comment:

If you get in, please submit a better webpage than this :)

...made me think. Whoever can make it into this box gets to replace the web page with whatever they want...they become owners and get to be "King of the Hill". Plus, if they acquire root access, then they presumably have the power to patch whatever hole they crawled through, making the box that much more secure.

But what could really prove interesting is if someone tried to break in and steal from the stealer...knocking off the old King and resulting in a King of the Hill, and so on...

All the while, people would be stress-testing the system. And people will have an ego-incentive to discover security holes because, if they find a way in, they get to be "King of the Mountain" until someone else finds a new way to crack the box.

Oh what a game this could become!!!
--Lenny

Re:MS site is down

They have a status page up. This is only from yesterday's activities:

8/3/99 Events
3:22pm - Network connections down due to router failure, possibly related to thunderstorms and power failures in the area

2:59pm - Network connections intermittently up

12:40pm - Network connections down due to router failure

11:02am - Services restarted

10:47am - Some services failed after reboot

10:45am - Reboot because the System log was full

10:30am - Network connections down due to router failure