This may be unrelated, but one of the things I've always thought is that contests, bug bounties, and things like it kind of give a free pass to hacking attempts, don't they?

Is this a well-understood part of these kinds of programs? Even the ones that say "color inside these lines" can be used to say, "Oh, sorry, I didn't know I was outside of the boundaries" if a person ever gets caught trying to get into a bad place.

So you've got all kinds of logs of me trying to break into your system, but as long as I fail I can just pretend like I was going after the bounty you've placed, right?