Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 28th Mar 2008 20:39 UTC, submitted by irbis
"An Apple Mac was the first victim in a hacker shoot-out to determine which operating system is the most secure. A former US National Security Agency employee has trousered USD 10000 for breaking into a MacBook Air at CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest. The MacBook was lined up against Linux and Vista PCs - which have so far remained uncracked. Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but yesterday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organisers using the computers to do things like visit websites or open email messages. The MacBook was the only system to be hacked by Thursday. Miller didn't need much time. He quickly directed the contest's organisers to visit a website that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on. He was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems." There is more bad news for Apple: "If you have Apple and compare it to Microsoft, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple." Update: The contest is over. Vista got hacked using Adobe's Flash, Ubuntu was left standing.
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Member since:2006-03-10
I think you made the case against, there. I for one think of "hacking" as actively breaking into a target system, without needing some unwitting assistance from the owner. Trojans and browser exploits cannot really be targeted towards a specific victim, unless you go to the trouble of performing some trick of social engineering, to get that person to run the trojan.exe or visit your poisoned website.
hacking = targeted, unaided
trojan-ing = indiscriminate, requires unwitting assistance of victim
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Of course it is still classed at hacking. How do you think a Trojan horse operates ? Exactly like the Trojan horse of legend. It would just sit there doing nothing until the people of Troy interacted with it, in their case, pulled it inside their town.
A computer Trojan horse is useless unless the user allows that into the system.