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MacBook Air First To Be Compromised In Hacking Contest
Multiple readers have written to let us know that the MacBook Air was the first laptop to fall in the CanSecWest hacking contest. The successful hijacking took place only two minutes into the second day of the competition, after the rules had been relaxed to allow the visiting of websites and opening of emails. The TippingPoint blog reveals that the vulnerability was located within Safari, but they won't release specific details until Apple has had a chance to correct the problem. The winner, Charlie Miller, gets to keep the laptop and $10,000. We covered the contest last year, and the results were similar.
Ah, the pride of 0wnership.
the sound of a million fanbois as they screamed Nooooooooooooo i sense i disturbance in the reality distortion generator set comments to flamebait and activate the extra moderation modules captain taco
Safari browser has massive security hole.
It's funny how they turned a huge hole in the Safari browser into a commercial for the Mac Air.
"Small size, big holes"
"The winner, Charlie Miller, gets to keep the laptop and $10,000."
You mean like when your airplane flight is cancelled and the airline offers you a free ticket. Or when the food at a restaurant is crappy and they give you a coupon to eat there again.
Seriously... Microsoft can't even pay people to take it, let alone get them to put in effort to get one.
The Vista machine would have been hacked quicker if it ran faster
Yes. The totally unbiased facts from a guy with "Mac" in his username.
The crap load is a metric unit?
So it is just coincidence that Apple are now pushing an unsafe Safari to Windows users (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/27/129236)?
;)
Or am I being a conspiracy nut?
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Sorry, you are confusing the Fuck-ton with the Ass-Load. The Imperial Ass-Load is the comparable unit. Fuck-ton is for measuring mass, not volume.
The contest was also sponsored by the likes of Google, Cisco, Adobe, some security folk... They must all have it in for Apple, oh no Apple is screwed! Plus if you read how the contest was run, it's hard to make the case that this was all pro-MS.
Get the facts... Up to the point where they support your agenda and then punt.
Yeah. A Laptop is safe, even connected to a network, provided you make no contact with the network as the user.
Like my car - very very safe as long as you don't back it out of the garage.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
You're right. With a stricter firewall, the browser wouldn't have been able to fetch anything over the internet at all.
"So the security will be even more relaxed on the third day because Ubuntu and Vista survived the first two days without a hack. The Mac finished last and is out of the race."
The Mac actually won because it was the first one to be exploited.
"Super user do", sounds better than "switch user do", so from here on, that's what it's going to stand for. I'm also changing the G in GNU to stand for GNU *is* Unix. Good day to you.
"Maybe I'm being ignorant" he says. Give him a chance. Give him one. ..."but was the same attention devoted to hacking the other systems?" Naah.. he lost it, the ignorant fool.
All the Apple patches in the world won't save you from this exploit
How about Firefox + NoScript? Actually I was hoping for an OS vulnerability, something where you can be targeted, but I suppose everyone deserves credit this time around.
Too bad David Maynor wasn't there. He woulda hacked the MacBook Air in 5 minutes!
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
If the winner got to keep it if they hacked it, maybe nobody *wanted* to hack the Vista machine? :-)
Well, they let them use a Vista laptop because Windows 7 isn't available yet (not sure it means anything, but Microsoft is still an OS generation behind Apple).
You seem to have that arse-about-face. In every way except the display system, even Windows NT 3.51, dating from the early '90s, was a generation ahead of OS X until about 10.4/10.5. Vista leapfrogged ahead with the display system, while 10.4 and 10.5 brought in parity with lower level aspects like fine-grained locking and an ACL-based security system (albeit still only applicable to the filesystem). For all intents and purposes they're equivalent, although arguably Windows is slightly ahead because of its better display system and more active development time.
No one is going to be interested in the fact that it required user-assistance and can't be executed remotely (which are by far the most worrisome.)