Mora's exploits were skillful but not beyond the realm of untold numbers of technically savvy people whose motivations range from mischief to malice. We asked Mora to try to quantify the threat. That has been our Openhack experience, and we advise expecting and planning for security breaches. Doing so requires defense in depth. We designed Openhack to include a complex mixture of corporate applications and operating systems, which turned out to be a security measure in and of itself.
Diversity increases costs and is difficult to maintain.
However, even without root access, an experienced hacker can do serious harm. The hacks that were successful were achieved via vulnerabilities in Akopia Inc.'s MiniVend storefront app and the Solaris documentation server Answer Book2. The AnswerBook2 vulnerability affects all versions of AnswerBook, at least as far back as Solaris 2.6, according to Sun officials. I should have gone through sooner. Security vulnerabilities are much more difficult to spot in closed-source applications, but that doesn't mean the vulnerabilities are not there.