Overview: Hello, challenge fans. Matt Carpenter and I have brewed up a new one for your analysis. The evidence is below. Analyze it and answer our questions. As always, we'll choose three winners: one technical champ, one creative victor whose answer is technically correct, and one lucky person chosen at random. As you work through this challenge, please observe this very important warning! As they say on TV, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. We'll go even further by saying, DO NOT TRY IT AT WORK EITHER. The commands included in this challenge are _highly_ destructive, and some of them are hardware specific. They will hose a machine badly. If you insist on testing the commands, at least use a strongly virtualized environment that isolates virtual hardware from physical hardware, and set a snapshot before each command so that you can revert to a pristine state. We wrote the challenge using VMware Workstation, and did not suffer damage to our underlying hosts. However, we cannot guarantee that your VMware experience will match our own. In other words, to borrow from the TV vernacular yet again, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. Furthermore, some so-called "virtualized environments" other than VMware are merely emulators that do not isolate hardware well, nor do they support snapshots. The commands below could damage such environments, so be very careful. You have been warned!

If you can’t answer this challenge 100%, still send something in to qualify as a random winner. This month’s prize is my book, Malware: Fighting Malicious Code, which I authored with Lenny Zeltser. Each winner gets a signed copy.

--Ed Skoudis, Intelguardians

Author, Counter Hack Reloaded