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Geekpedia » Tech News » In Contest, Mac OS X Hacked In Over A Minute

In Contest, Mac OS X Hacked In Over A Minute

On Saturday, March 29th 2008 at 04:04 PM

By Andrei Pociu (View Profile)

At the CanSecWest security conference there is an annual PWN 2 OWN hacking contest, where a number of devices is given to a group of hackers to break into. The first hacker to succeed, gets to own the device he broke into, as well as a cash price of $10,000.

This year, the contest asked the participants to hack a Fujitsu U810 running Windows Vista Ultimate, an Apple MacBook Air running Mac OS X 10.5.2 and a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10. In the first day, the contest allowed only network attacks and none of the 3 systems could be broken into. However, the second day allowed attacks on client-side applications that come with the operating system, such as web browsers and email clients. The MacBook Air was the only one that was hacked into using an undisclosed vulnerability in the Safari 3.1 web browser, in under two minutes.

The Windows Vista and Ubuntu systems could not be hacked in the contest so far, and thus the next stage will allow the hackers to install any popular 3rd party application on the target machine and hack their way through an exploit of that application.

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Current Comments

by ben on Sunday, March 30th 2008 at 05:21 PM

Just got news that the Vista machine was finally hacked into in the 3rd step of the contest through a vulnerability in Adobe Flash.

by elis85 on Sunday, March 30th 2008 at 09:35 PM

Apparently the same flaw in Flash could've been used to get into the Ubuntu machine. But because they had a choice of which one to hack and the Vista laptop was sweeter, they went for it.