Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 30th Mar 2008 20:35 UTC
As you surely know by now, the CanSecWest conference was the stage for a contest, PWN to OWN. Three laptops were set up; laptops running Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and Mac OS X. The goal was to hack the computer and read the contents of a file located on each of the machines, using a 0day code execution vulnerability. During the first day, you can only attack the machine over the network, without physical access. On the second day, user interaction comes into play (visiting a website, opening an email). On the third and final day, third-party applications are added to the mix. Each machine had the same cash prize on its head. As you all know, the Mac was hacked first, on day two. The user only had to visit a website, and the Mac was hacked. Vista got hacked on the third day using a security hole in Adobe's Flash, and the Ubuntu machine did not get hacked at all. Update: Roughly Drafted responds.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
It's all just a load of hot air after all. So yeah, some vulnerability has been found. They find them every day, in Linux, in Windows, in OSX. Just read any change log. Let's talk when there's some actual harm being done to Mac users. If we ever get to that point of course. He's right in saying that Windows has been a plague for the whole computing world and he's also right in saying the media really wants you to believe that somehow down is the new up.
Surely you can have a sterile environment that compares Vista to Mac OSX, but in reality there are way too many users who still use unpatched Windows XP/2000/98 installations and that still counts. While on the other hand Mac users tend to migrate to newer versions of the OS quite faster. It's what happens in the real world that matters. The fact that somebody has found a vulnerability won't change anything.