It took a hacker less than 30 minutes to gain root-level access to Mac OS X, according to a report from ZDNet. The hacker who penetrated the system called the Mac "easy pickings."
The security breach took place on February 22 after a Swedish devotee of the Mac set up a Mac Mini as a server and invited all takers to try to compromise the system's security to gain root-level control. Once a hacker has gained root access to a computer system, the attacker can install applications, delete files and folders, and use the computer for any nefarious purpose.
The competition was over in a matter of hours after a hacker, who asked to be identified only as "Gwerdna," gained access to the server in question and defaced the Web site with a message that read, "This sucks. Six hours later this poor little Mac was owned and this page got defaced."
Gwerdna told ZDNet that it took him a mere 30 minutes or less to gain root control of the Mac. "It probably took about 20 or 30 minutes to get root on the box," Gwerdna said. "Initially, I tried looking around the box for certain misconfigurations and other obvious things but then I decided to use some unpublished exploits -- of which there are a lot for the Mac OS X."
Read more: Hacker Gains Root Access to Mac OS X in 30 Minutes - Yahoo! News
Well I have to say this story is a bit on the bogus side as the "challange" allowed users to set up accounts to get access to the machine and the "winner" used an exploit that made his limited acces acount into an admin account which is not an accurate gauge of security because you can do the same thing in windows in much less time if someone let you in! It would have been a true test if he just gave out the url just like the university in wissconson did and dare you to hack it. no OS is un hackable but mac OS is harder then others because of it's closed nature and the fact that like 3% of computer users have it and nobody is wasting there time to hack only 3% of the computers in the world :)