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Last Year's CanSecWest Winner Repeats on Vista, Ubuntu Wins
DimitryGH followed up on the earlier news that the MacBook Air lost CanSecWest by noting that "Last year's winner of the CanSecWest hacking contest has won the Vista laptop in this year's competition. According to the sponsor TippingPoint's blog, Shane Macaulay used a new 0day exploit against Adobe Flash in order to secure his win. At the end of the day, the only laptop (of OS X, Vista, and Ubuntu) that remained unharmed was the one running Ubuntu. How's that for fueling religious platform wars?"
Hint: script kiddies don't tend to have 0day in the real world.
What's the betting that the Linux and MacOS versions of Flash are also vulnerable to this 0day? It's rare for a Flash issue to affect only one platform (the same is true of the Acrobat reader and other typical cross-platform browser plug-ins.) Let's wait for the Adobe advisory before jumping to conclusions, shall we? (Disclaimer, I'm a Linux user.)
... but it certainly confirms my strong aversion to putting anything Adobe on my machines. Seriously, who hasn't noticed how invasive and hoggish Adobe's stuff is? I cringe when I click a link to a PDF in a website, causing Adobe reader to launch inside the browser. It brings any machine to its knees as it consumes every available resource while rendering a simple document. And Adobe Elements (that's their "lightweight" photo product) takes the better part of a minute to start up on my dual core, 2GB box (non-RAIDed SATA drive). I guess it shouldn't surprise me that they have security problems as well ... slow software is usually sloppy software, and sloppy software is usually insecure software.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The really fun thing about absolute statements is that one counter-example disproves them. I use Linux on desktop. See? You're wrong. :-)
Of course, so does my wife (who majored in fashion merchandising), and my 88 year old father, and the exchange student who stayed in my house last year, and roughly half of the thousand people at PyCon two weeks ago (just from snooping screens during the plenaries), and about 4% of the desktop users world-wide. True, that's small compared to Windows' 85% share and a bit below Mac's 8%, but it's certainly not "nobody".
And note that the market share leader Windows survived the Mac by a day (though, my friend the Mac-fan said that only proves the Mac was so much more desirable than the other two laptops - touché! :-)
Well, anyway, sorry to have fed the troll.