Mar 31 2005

Stupid Ideas department

Published by Martin at 7:28 am under Hacking

SC Magazine: $25k Mac virus competition taken off line

This is just what we need, someone offering hackers additional incentive to create viruses. I’m just glad they were smart enough to hear the community at large and stop the competition.

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2 Responses to “Stupid Ideas department”

  1. # David Quaintonon 31 Mar 2005 at 7:57 am

    The whole story was a rather strange affair, I received loads of emails about DVForge CEO Jack Campbell after that, prompting this follow-up:
    http://www.scmagazine.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsDetails&newsUID=8c6e9200-75be-4af2-a07f-e1802cac91db&newsType=Latest%20News

  2. # Dana Epp (SilverStr)on 31 Mar 2005 at 9:31 am

    It goes deeper then this though. I talked about this in a recent blog entry (http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog/archives/000812.html) where I point out this is a futile offering.

    What Jack failed to do was profile the attacker. No hacker in his right mind is going to take him up on his offer. And all he does is seed the industry with more newbie script-kiddies looking to get in the lime light for being ‘1337′.

    Many security vendors are no better though. Hack-me competitions like this always fail to show how secure something is. Just because a security product functions properly does not mean it’s secure. And not having a current attack vector through a MAC focused virus doesn’t mean OSX isn’t vulnerable. When will people wake up?!? *sigh*