Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Mac OS X least secure OS at PWN2OWN

At the PWN2OWN contest this year, hackers were given the chance to circumvent security defenses in the latest versions of Mac OS X, Windows Vista and in a distribution of Linux. [...]

The three laptops (VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10, Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1, and a MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2) all held out for the first day of the contest (remotely exploitable vulnerabilities), and so the rules were relaxed on the second day to also include any default installed client-side applications.

This led to a quick compromise of Safari, and therefore of the MacBook Air laptop.
Vista and Linux remained unscathed.

On the third day, the rules were changed again: "popular" third-party client applications were added to the mix, and this is where Vista's security features could not keep up. (more)

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