Tue 7 March 2006 11:59 PM CST (8 March 2006 0559 GMT)
The test is now closed.
The response has been very strong, and the test has illustrated its point.
Traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps.
Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus.
The machine was under intermittent DoS attack. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up.
The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations.
There were no successful access attempts of any kind, including during the 38 hour duration of the test period, nor have their been any claims of success. The host is still the same host and configuration used for the test.
I stand corrected. I would still like to see a similar test on an XP/2003 machine. I believe the results would be nearly identical. I still think Windows gets a bad rep on security because administrators don’t maintain their systems. I have not had a virus outbreak or an attack occur on systems I have been managing for years now.
You are so right! Good administrators maintaining their systems can make all the difference!