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Crack LinuxPPC Day 3:It Gets Better

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the crazy-games-people-play dept.

So this ought to amuse ya: Its Day 3 of the Crack LinuxPPC, Win PPC Contest that Jeff Carr has been doing. During that time, The Win2k crack box has gone down several times... yet the LinuxPPC box remains stable. Jeff has decided to make the game more interesting. The machine is still crack.linuxppc.org, but the world now may know that the Root Password is "linuxppc". If you can crack the stock LinuxPPC box in a reproducable manner, you get the machine.

4 of 461 comments (clear)

  1. Example of proficient techies at Microsoft. by MrEd · · Score: 3
    Excerpt from the Status Log on the Win2k box:

    1:00pm - Tuned IIS' performance options reset application protection to Medium, and rebooted.

    8:54am - Changed IIS' application protection to Low and rebooted, site back up

    In other words, "Dragged slider bar in IIS window to a different setting, and waited five minutes while the system rebooted and restarted most of the services."

    "Tuned" my ass.

    --

    Wah!

  2. Re:Crack with the root password? by Maciej+Stachowiak · · Score: 3

    On most stock Linux installs you can't log
    in directly as root remotely. You'd still
    need to get at least a non-root shell somehow.

    Basically he is just lowering the barrier of entry from "get a root shell" to "get a shell", but given the number of rootkits out for Linux, these are already pretty equivalent (penetrating a Linux box remotely is a lot harder than getting root once you are in).

  3. Re: Unompressed by both, but more impressed by by IvanR · · Score: 3
    Actually, it looks like the PR folks are already starting up the spin machine. In this new article on CNET, the ground rules of "Change something you shouldn't have access to" are listed. It goes on to mention that the guestbook had been changed. The article then quotes a director of marketing for MS:
    "That's an application, not Windows 2000," he said.

    "It's been up for most of the day today," he added.

    Now that's comedy.

    Ivan.

  4. Re:??? If we know the root password... by GeorgieBoy · · Score: 3

    It's not that simple. You can't login as root over telnet/rlogin, ftp, etc. unless you specifically set that to be allowed (an obvious security hazard). Without a user account, it's harder, and some kind of exploit needs to be found. Having the root password only makes it easier once you have some sort of access to the system.