The thirty minute guy must be on vacation. :-)
The 30 minute guy was given a local account on the computer as a launch point. He didn't have to hack the computer first.
Given that much of a leg up, the 30 minute guy was lucky he was the first. There are probably thousands of hackers out there that can hack a UNIX based system after being given a local account and SSH access.
A local account and SSH access is all you need to copy any software you want into your personal home directory on the remote machine and launch it. The hard part is convincing a computer to grant you access in the first place.
Windows machines with no network services turned on are more vulnerable than a UNIX box with no network services turned on.