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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.
While having physical access to a machine makes it 80% vulnerable, the rest 20% seems to be OS driven.
Am surprised that Mac OS X didn't prompt the user for root password at all.
If it had and the user had typed it in to invoke the crack, then it is no crack at all.
But in this case Mac seems to be running like XP, which is terrifying.
XP grew up in a bad neighborhood with lots of people hacking into your home and kicking you. So you grew up to disproportionate sizes to counter the bullies and also put in rudimentary plyboards to prevent them from coming in.
Also you started building a fort around yourself (Vista) so that others can be seen swimming towards your fort and sunk.
All in all, XP's rapid "growing up" and the fact that it has become robust over years shows the brutal world out there in wild.
Mac has been living the sheltered life like the Lion in the Zoo in Madagascar.
Safari was its first brutal exposure to the bad world and its quick exploit by XP hackers proved to be as much of a shock to Apple as it did to Mac Fanboys(who could not dispute or ridicule like the republicans do their opponents).
Now, the hurd has taken the battle to Apple's camp and cracked its Mac OS X through Safari.
One perverse way Microsoft must be celebrating that their default install of XP or Vista did not crack so easily.
Probably Apple needs some Microsoft lessons. But then apple has always sued hackers or jailed them, unlike Microsoft which has an uneasy peace with them.
Bottomline: Microsoft has been slowly improving default security and is kinda crackproof.
Mac still believes all users are angels and its hallelujah crowd will defend its glory.
Apple is in for a rude surprise when it enters the wild world of Windows.
Welcome to Earth!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
...an Air gap.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
Man, the macbook air is suuuch a lightweight!
That comment is awesome in its lack of punctuation.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I guess you don't read that many books? Most books i have read in english have very long sentences. Magazines on the other hand seems to be written for people with reading problems.
I guess people with a lack in decoding skills have problems reading long sentences. This is probably because you need to keep the whole sentence in youre head before you can decode it.
HTTP/1.1 400