In the beginning, the concept was simple: pay $10,000 to anyone who could bypass the security on a Macintosh Web server using only off-the-shelf software to protect the system (see TidBITS-303)

[Back in TidBITS-375, we noted the success of the "Crack A Mac" challenge held in Sweden for two months last February to April. The contest offered prize money - eventually more than $13,000 U.S

Computer security - or, rather, computer data security - is not a new idea. For as long as sensitive information has been stored on punch cards, tapes, and disks, money has been changing hands to make sure that information cannot be accessed without permission

Cracked! To the surprise of the Macintosh Internet community, the second-generation Crack-A-Mac Web server security challenge noted in TidBITS-387 was successfully defeated last week

It's about time someone realized what we in the Mac Internet community have been saying for years. Even better, that someone is the U.S. Army. Here's the story

Like many Mac users, I've been busy this last week installing Apple's Open Transport Tuner 1.0. This patch blocks a potential denial of service attack that can be launched from Macintosh systems running Mac OS 9 and certain CPU configurations running Mac OS 8.6 - see Geoff Duncan's piece in this issue for details on the vulnerability and Apple's fix. John Copeland, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, identified this potential attack after detecting a port scan on his home network