Get Paid To Crack?

John Klein writes "Corporate Technologies USA, Inc. is offering hackers $250US and up as part of the Hacker Wargame Research Project. Participants are given sufficient time to hack three primary goals on real Windows 2000 servers on an internet connected wargame network. The servers are updated with fairly current Windows patches, so this is not necessarily an easy task. The difficulty is part of the point. The Project is studying how hackers think, called cognitive research, in an effort to better understand how future IDSs might identify the target of an attack during it's early stages. The Project guarantees complete anonymity for those that want to participate without pay, or complete privacy protection to those that choose to get paid."

Comments

Not a lot of confidence...

[Johnny Mnemonic]

From their FAQ:

You should be able to complete the goals easily without the need to break any laws...[in] about 5 hours

Sounds like this is more of a "target-rich environment" where they expect the dedicated hacker to succeed, and they want to study means/methods, rather than a "our box is unbreakable" type challenge. I think they'll be writing a lot of $250 checks--which explains also why the sum is low.

Re:It's easy

[Lord Crc]

How about saying what it does, so I wouldn't have to reinstall wmp? (for those who haven't clicked yet, it nukes wmplayer.exe)

Yeah yeah, don't click on a slashdot link etc, but still...