The security of Apple Computer's operating system remained a topic of controversy this week, as one Mac hacking challenge got the thumbs down for being too easy, spurring an Apple expert to kick off a more balanced contest.

In an article published on Monday, News.com reported that a contestant in a Mac OS X hacking challenge had breached the test system in 30 minutes. The article quickly became the focus of controversy because it originally neglected to mention that every attacker had been given an account on the system, making the contest much easier than originally portrayed, critics maintained.

Later Monday, David Schroeder, senior Apple systems engineer for the University of Wisconsin's IT Department, set up his own contest inviting security researchers and hackers to attempt to breach a Mac with open SSH and HTML ports and two user accounts. A critic of the original contest, Schroeder stressed that his challenge is more fair, but that most users will not likely even have those ports open.

"Mac OS X is not invulnerable--it, like any other operating system, has security deficiencies in various aspects of the software," Schroeder wrote. "However, the general architecture and design philosophy of Mac OS X, in addition to usage of open source components for most network-accessible services that receive intense peer scrutiny from the community, make Mac OS X a very secure operating system."

Flaw finders have focused on Apple's Mac OS X operating system in recent years, and while Mac users argue that the system is more secure than Microsoft's Windows XP, the operating system's security is under scrutiny because of recent attempts to create malicious code for the platform.