The winner of the contest, Thomas Roessler, a student in mathematics at the University of Bonn in Germany, has dabbled but not done digital forensics work in the past. In fact, the detectives produced several leads to the identity of the culprit. Lance Spitzner, the founder of the Honeynet Project and senior security architect at Sun Microsystems, said they would not prosecute the person responsible. Such online vandals are extremely common, he said. Cohen, who both teaches forensics and works on actual cases, stressed that companies need to understand the difficulty, and costs, involved.
Companies tend to balk at agreeing to that kind of expense when there is no guaranteed payoff.
Dittrich also hoped that the contest would open the eyes of corporate executives, who all too often want a quick fix. Most of the time, such quick fixes just mean the attacker gets another shot at the system. Some computers at the University of Washington have been compromised five times, he said. The Honeynet Project plans to do another contest, said Dittrich, but it's a question of time. There was a lot of work that was done just in the judging.