Dave Schroeder, a senior systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin, launched his contest on Monday. The objective is to hack into his Mac Mini and alter the website hosted on it. The Mac Mini is running Mac OS X 10.4.5 fully patched with SSH and HTTP open to the public.
Unfortunately ZDNet had posted an article on this challenge creating a frenzy of people trying to hack this poor Mac Mini all at once. The result was over 4000 SSH login attempts, traffic spiking over 30 Mbps and intermittent DoS attacks amonst a slew of other scans and attacks.
No one was able to get into the Mac from the outside but Dave was handing out local user account to a those who asked and the system was compromised using known local privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
