ZDNET Australia reports today that Mac OS X was hacked in less than 30 minutes. Well, that's probably the most horrible title to an article I have every read in my life considering the contest in question gave the contestants local ssh access to try and gain root access. As my friend said, "it's like giving someone a key to your front door and saying 'okay, now try and break in!'". I would bet money that none of those 'contestants' could have gained root access to the system without first being given ssh access to the machine. Hell, I have a great way to prevent this all together, leave OS X's default preferences for 'Remote Login' in Sharing > Services set to not enabled. I mean, if SSH isn't enabled users can't even get root access if you give them the root password.

Bottom line, I hate these stupid articles from these stupid people who are getting paid to write articles that have false information in them and are completely misleading to the unknowing.

UPDATE: Damien Barrett over at Tuaw made a great post about why the above article is 'full of empty facts', as Damien put it. I completely overlooked one of his points in my argument, the fact that if your machine is behind NAT (regular 'ole router will do this), there is no chance in hell someone could get into your machine. But, I will say that this is about OS X security and not about network security. So even leaving that point aside, I still say that this article is completely misleading and the 'contest' in question is basically a load of crap because they gave everyone ssh access to the machine.