Warnings Legitimize Hacking Contest

from the oops dept

This story is appearing everywhere, which is going to have the reverse impact it intended. The Associated Press is running a story saying that government and private security officials are warning companies of a hacking contest planned for this coming Sunday. Of course, there are similar hacking contests all the time, and plenty of people are constantly trying to deface sites, so who knows if this is really a big deal. However, by making sure the news is spread absolutely everywhere, it's helping to legitimize this particular contest, and ensure additional entrants. Companies should do their best to make their sites secure whether or not there's a hacking contest going on. Meanwhile, as is mentioned in the article, the "reward" for this particular contest is 500 megs of online storage space - which a hacker could pretty easily claim on any machine he or she broke into.

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