Sunday, March 30, 2008

Macbook Air Hacked

One of the things that Apple has always prided itself over and promoted in no uncertain terms, has been the so-called 'robust security' offered by its OSX operating system. However this supposition of Apple's took a huge beating on Thursday when a team of researchers from Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) managed to hack a MacBook Air in just two minutes using a previously unknown security vulnerability in Apple’s own safari browser.

The people who did the 'hack' were ISE security researchers - Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel – who were participating in the "PWN to OWN" competition at the CanSecWest security conference, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In this competition there were 3 laptops, with different OS’s offered for being hacked into. These included an Apple Macbook Air running OS X 10.5.2, a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10 and a Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1. Anyone who could successfully hack or exploit these machines would win a $10,000 price from famous security company Tipping Point.

The first to go was of course the Macbook, followed by Windows Vista. Ubuntu stood strong despite repeated attempts.

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