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Students vs. Hackers
sethfogie wrote to mention Informit.com's coverage of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Students put their skills to the test, trying to lock down systems against intrusion from an invading hacker team. All in the name of learning. From the article: "When the three hour grace period was over, the Red Team slowly worked their way into attack mode. One member started to sort through the information they gleaned from their scans and investigated each possible exploit. Another member fired up a MySQL database client and started to poke around the students databases looking for sensitive data. The two others were adding/changing accounts to routers, firewalls, and systems. However, for the most part, the students were not being pelted with attacks. And this continued for the next several hours."
As a funny note, we locked ourselves out of our firewall almost immediately
Are you sure you don't work for my company? They call this a security feature where I work,
Geeks are perfect skeptics. They're incredibly smart, and their preternatural awkwardness gives them a tendency to analyze all elements personal communication to the point where they can pick one bullshitter out of a dozen. It's astounding, seeing the results of studies that show that hard-core geeks are practically impossible to trip up, and I can vouch for this in my everyday experience: I've known dozens of people who installed Linux, and no one has ever managed to pull a fast one on any of them, ever. You have nothing to worry about.