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[bacasper]

China embarrasses US in NSA hacking contest

National Security Agency-backed TopCoder Open competition raises big questions

By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld

Programmers from China and Russia have dominated an international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.

Whether the outcome of this competition is another sign that math and science education in the US needs improvement may spur debate. But of the 70 finalists in it, 20 were from China, 10 from Russia and only two from the US.

TopCoder, which runs software competitions as part of its software development service, operates TopCoder Open, an annual contest.

About 4,200 people participated in the US National Security Agency-supported challenge. The NSA has been sponsoring the program for a number of years because of its interest in hiring people with advanced skills.

Participants in the contest, which was open to anyone - from student to professional - and finished with 120 competitors from around the world, went through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas.

China's showing in the finals was also helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others.

Of the total number of contestants, 93 percent were male, and 84 percent were aged between 18 and 24.

Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, said the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education.

"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there," Hughes said. He said the US needs to make earlier inroads in middle schools and high school math and science education.

That's a point Hughes is hardly alone on. President Barack Obama, as well as many of the major tech leaders including Bill Gates, have called for similar action.

Of the participants in the contest, more than 57 percent had bachelor's degrees, most in computer science, and of that 20 percent had earned a masters degree, and 6 percent a PhD.

But the winner of the algorithm competition was an 18-year-old student from China, Bin Jin, who went by the handle "crazyb0y". Chinese programmers have a history of doing very well in this contest.

Mike Lydon, TopCoder's CTO, said Jin's future in computer science is assured. "This gentleman can do whatever he wants," he said.

The participants are tested in design, development, architecture, among others, but one of the most popular is the algorithm coding contest.

To give some sense of difficulty, Lydon provided a description of a problem that the contestants were asked to solve:

"With the rise of services such as Facebook and MySpace, the analysis and understanding of such networks is a particularly active area of current computer science research. At an abstract level, these networks consist of nodes (people), connected by links (friendship).

[RJjr]

I've read a lot about E*Trade accounts getting hacked by Russians.

Mine got hacked by someone in Malaysia. I haven't bought or sold stocks in a few years, but my 2005 tax return was being audited by the IRS last year. The IRS said I owed them nearly $22,000 in capital gains on stock sales, so I needed to get on my E*Trade account to make print outs of the cost basis and revenue for each transaction, but couldn't remember my password since I hadn't logged on in so long. I called E*Trade to let them know I needed to log on but couldn't remember my password, and that it pertained to an IRS audit. The E*Trade phone rep asked me several security questions, and at one point asked me about the last place I had logged on. I told her it had to have been in Tennessee. She said, no, it had been Malaysia "a few days ago." I told her that I've never even been in Malaysia in my whole life. Ever. It's a good thing there wasn't money or stocks in my account for the hacker to steal.

I googled "E*Trade account hacked" to see if it had happened to anyone else, and there were anecdotes about people getting their accounts wiped out. Here's one of them: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/159/ripoff0159339.htm Some Americans were even saying E*Trade even sent their money to places like Russia. Unreal. It makes me wonder if some organized crime outfits have some of their guys working at some of these banks and brokerages. In any case, I'll never do another online banking or brokerage account with any company.

And for the happy ending, the IRS sent me a check for almost $800 at the end of the audit.

[pkang0202]

Makes sense. China or Russia don't have the FBI knocking on their doors for doing something as simple as port scanning.

Hell, just getting into someone's Yahoo account (Sarah Palin) caused a nationwide uproar.

Also, the best crackers/hackers in the USA sure don't work for the government.