£10,000 Prize for Linux Virus Challenge Re-Issued

mutantcamel writes "Eddie Bleasdale, the director of NetProject has been offering £10,000 to the first hacker to infect his Linux machine with a virus for the last two years, and so far no one has hit the jackpot. He's re-announced his challenge to virus writers following a Gartner report which told IT depts. not to trust MS server software because of recent worm attacks on their servers, but a Microsoft exec said yesterday that the hugely successful worm attacks were due to 'tardy' sysadmins."

Comments

If businesses want to make their networks secure

[Skapare]

If businesses want to make their networks secure, they need to hire someone who cares and knows how, and pay well to get that person. Then don't hinder them with petty things like bureaucracy. They should report directly to the CTO or CIO, or actually be the CTO or CIO.

Have you ever worked as a real sysadmin?

[dustpuppy]

I agree that some of the responsibility lies with the sysadmin, but then again, the OS should be designed well enough that the patches are minimal.

I work in an enterprise unix environment and getting time for outages to apply patches is incredibly tough when you are running 24x7 systems that are critical to the operation of the customer.

Sure, we try to patch systems when we find out about security holes, but there comes a time when you cannot simply afford to take your systems down every week to apply new patches. Now I don't deal with MS stuff so I can't comment authoritively, but it seems that the number of patches with MS products is never ending. This stops being a sysadmin problem and becomes a vendor (ie Microsoft) issue. Ultimately, it's a sloppy coding issue that lies with Microsoft.

Windows Update?

[sharkey]

Microsoft exec said yesterday that the hugely successful worm attacks were due to 'tardy' sysadmins.

So the admins responsible for Windows Update are considered 'tards by Microsoft? After all, windowsupdate.microsoft.com was reportedly "hacked by Chinese" this summer.