Thanks again to Tom, Ed and the folks at Intelguardians. Tom has plowed through all of the entries and has picked out the best technical and the best creative answer. And as always the fancy coin toss has produced yet another lucky random winner. All three will get signed copipes of Ed and Tom's book, Counter Hack Reloaded.

Tom, never one to be predictable, has a new way of presenting the answers. As fans of our Skillz Challenges know, the author usually presents his answers and then reveals the winners. In fact, the last time Tom revealed answers, he did it all in rhyme (Netcat in the Hat)! But this time, we had such a thoroughly great answer submitted by the creative winner, that Tom felt it was better than anything he could put together. Read on to see just how good this one is.

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Microsoft Office Space: A SQL With Flair
Answers & Winners

In Tom Liston's own words:

"Once again, it's time to publish answers to our last Skillz Challenge, Microsoft Office Space: A SQL With Flair. First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who wrote in and tried to come up with an answer. I'd also like to give a nod to Josh Wright, who contacted me a couple years back with a little puzzle that we worked out together that I further adapted into this challenge. Finally, kudos to Balazs Attila-Mihaly, our "Technical" winner and Andrew Laman, our "Most Creative" winner for their superb efforts. Balazs did a wonderful job detailing the problems with Initrode's accounting system... even sending in source code that could be used to create the "additions" necessary to match the CRC32 checksums on the "new and improved" SQL statements. Andrew did such a wonderful job of answering the questions in a manner and style that fit with the original Challenge, that I thought it only fitting to present his answer here with only a little touch of editing. Great job, Andrew!"

As a reminder, the questions to the challenge were:

1) Aside from hating their jobs, what impending action might be another reason for the boys to try this plan?

2) Why was Peter smiling? What mistakes had Initrode made in their accounting system design?

3) Give a working example of a forged transaction using the values in Peter's second example.

4) How should the transaction system be fixed to avoid this kind of problem in the future?

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