"I cracked debian.org, and for $10,000, I'll crack the Linux 2.4 server of your choice."

"I cracked debian.org, and for $10,000, I'll crack the Linux 2.4 server of your choice."

I know a number of laid-off hackers who have invested time in open-source development or other community-service programming projects, hoping that these projects will make them more likely to catch the attention of potential employers. Maybe the slow economy has made the computer-crime business harder, and driven some of the brighter crooks to make similar demonstrations of their skills.

(Note that in all of these cases, unlike the recent spate of Windows worms, the author of the exploit was using it against a high-profile server and tried to remain undetected, rather than distributing the exploit widely in a way that would make the news by bringing down a large number of machines.)

Or maybe it's a pure ego thing. If I were the sort of person who liked to break into other people's computers, and I figured out how to break into a server for a major Linux distribution, I would feel extremely 31337.

Either of these things is more likely, I think, than a shadowy anti-Linux campaign by Microsoft.