Microsoft: programming contest defaced, not hacked

David M Williams
Tuesday, 07 October 2008 18:49

Business IT - Technology

Yesterday I reported on a Microsoft Australia programming contest to find star developers which had many more submissions from "Ov3rLord" and Turkish self-labelled hackers than genuine entrants. Microsoft phoned in their side of the story. Yet even if the site was not hacked (and suffered merely the lesser charge of prank defacement) it still suffered problems.

Yesterday’s story, “Microsoft programming contest hacked, defaced” reached Microsoft’s ears. A representative of the software giant called me to express concern over the wording I’d used. The site was not hacked, they say, but rather non-genuine submissions were posted onto the web site.

A Microsoft spokesperson stated “Over the weekend, a number of entries to the DevSta Challenge were posted on the Web site that are best described as non-genuine in nature. However, Microsoft can confirm that the site remained secure and was not compromised at any time. The submissions in question have since been removed.”

Given the trite nature of the vandalism it’s easy to believe what Microsoft’s say. The pictures I included show what amount to nothing more than rubbish postings in a user-submitted area of the site, specifically, the contest submissions. It would be pretty unbelievable to suggest in any way confidential data was accessed or divulged.

The question does arise as to why these postings were not moderated in any way; after all, conceivably the submissions may have contained other content Microsoft would not wish associated with itself including unpleasant language or imagery or things far worse.

Still, non-genuine submissions do not explain one thing: I know when I browsed the site over the weekend the subtitle for the Submissions directory contained a foreign language phrase. Regretfully I did not take a screen shot, thinking it may have been a deliberate Latin motto.

Today, after the rest of the vandalism has been removed, the phrase reads “During the competition, submissions are entered here. Could you be the 2008 DevSta?” and has definitely changed. This isn’t necessarily nefarious; what I saw may well have been the famed “lorem ipsum” phrase used for dummy content.

Nevertheless, although Microsoft removed the non-genuine submissions it seems they still exist in some form. And other problems caused angst to legitimate contest entrants. Let me elaborate.

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