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A group of four Polish hackers has won $50,000 in a hacking challenge at InfoSecurity 2001 at London's Olympia - a day before the show officially opens.
The four have also beaten a system which stood firm against waves of hackers in three previous competitions. Security specialist Argus Systems, which set up the challenge, this afternoon confirmed that the group - LSD or 'last stage of delirium' - has succeeded. A statement is to be issued later today, but a company spokesman said: "They have won it by exploiting a hitherto unknown vulnerability of the Solaris X86 operating system." Argus had set up a secure server with its PitBull security system on an x86 system running Solaris 7 in conjunction with German security firm Articon Integralis and Fujitsu-Siemens. The company has run three previous competitions with no-one gaining access. The server was opened at 16:00(BST) last Friday, to be a feature at the security exhibition which runs for most of this week. The Polish team of security consultants claim to have broken in by 09:00(BST) Saturday morning. In their victory announcement, Michal Chmielewski, Sergiusz Fornrobert, Adam Gowdiak and Tomasz Ostwald claim to be Belgian. However, their site, lsd-pl.net is maintained by the Technical University of Poznan in Poland and the group of computer graduates are believed to have links to the University of Cracow. When silicon.com contacted Sun, it had not yet had the news. The company is currently preparing a statement. silicon.com is currently conducting a campaign to fight fraud on the net by calling for the creation of an independent body that cybercrime victims can report to in confidence. If you want to support this campaign, send a mail to editorial@silicon.com