Microsoft Challenges All Hackers: Crash Windows 2000

	Microsoft Challenges All Hackers: Crash Windows 2000

	Company:	Microsoft
	Category:	Other News
	Date:	6-Aug-1999

	Redmond, WA (microcontroller.com) - Microsoft has issued an invitation to the hacker community. Anyone can browse over to http://www.Windows2000test.com and attempt to shut down their Windows 2000 test server by whatever means at their disposal. Microsoft even provides some suggestions on their site. According to the Ground Rules, "You are welcome to attempt to compromise this site, and this site only. This is your chance to do a practical test of Microsoft Windows 2000's security." The server is running the latest Windows 2000 Beta release running on a Pentium II 350 with 128M RAM. It is not protected by a firewall. However, since the server went live last Tuesday August 2 1999, the server has been down for most of this week. Microsoft claims that this is due to problems with the Windows2000 Beta operating system and not due to any hacker attempts. The site appears to be under moderate attack - during one 18-minute interval it was subjected to 178 syn flood attacks, a common method of shutting down a server which involves sending repeated requests to a server more rapidly than the server can send acknowledgements to all the requests. This can flood the receiving servers buffer and shut down the server to further access. What This Means for Embedded Developers For Embedded Developers, the ability to put a PC on the internet without a firewall opens up some interesting debugging opportunities. Developers can remotely access their development environment anywhere anytime. Conceivably an engineer can access their lab computer to do a remote hardware debugging session from anywhere - at home, at a customer's location, etc. Windows NT is not presently not suitable for this task because not all embedded development tools will run on Windows NT; plus, difficulty in setting Windows NT's security options may lead to a compromise of proprietary source code.

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Microsoft Challenges All Hackers: Crash Windows 2000

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