Hugh Pickens writes "A team of Army cadets spent four days at West Point last week struggling around the clock to keep a number cruncher* network general expenses while hackers from the national protector Agency tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The NSA made the cadets' task more arduous by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on thousands* of televisions around the world. The striving was a final exam for analog science and the latest telecommunications majors, who competed against teams from the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine as well as the Naval Postgraduate Academy and the Air Force rule of Technology. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools' expert systems while also defending their own but only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, and special authorizations is allowed to take down a US network. NSA tailored its attacks to be just 'a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could majestic the strongest teams from the weaker ones.' The winning West Point team used Linux, instead of relying on proprietary seconds from big-name companies like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems."

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Mark