A hacker managed to break into a Mac and win a $10,000 prize as part of a contest started at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.
In winning the contest, he exposed a hole in Safari, Apple’s browser. "Currently, every copy of OS X out there now is vulnerable to this," said Sean Comeau, one of the organizers of CanSecWest.
The conference organizers decided to offer the contest in part to draw attention to possible security shortcomings in Macs. "You see a lot of people running OS X saying it’s so secure, and frankly, Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has," said Dragos Ruiu, the principal organizer of security conferences including CanSecWest.
Dino Di Zovie, who lives in New York, sent along a URL that exposed the hole. Because the contest was only open to attendees in Vancouver, he sent it to a friend who was at the conference and forwarded it on.
The URL opened a blank page but exposed a vulnerability in input handling in Safari, Comeau said. An attacker could use the vulnerability in a number of ways, but Di Zovie used it to open a back door that gave him access to anything on the computer, Comeau said.
The vulnerability won’t be published. 3Com’s TippingPoint division, which put up the cash prize, will handle disclosing it to Apple.
One reason Macs haven’t been much of a target for hackers is that there are fewer to attack, said Terri Forslof, manager of security response for TippingPoint. "It’s an incentive issue. The Mac is not as widely deployed of a platform as, say, Windows," she said. In this case, the cash may have provided motivation.
Was it a coincidence that on late Thursday Apple released a patch for 25 vulnerabilities in OS X? :)
According to Ubuntu once Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) is out, there will be plenty to celebrate, whether you were directly involved the release process or just rejoice because the next iteration of the best distribution is finally out.
