Pwn2Own – and the Macbook Air Falls
Ambiguic Coherence
I don’t know how many of you follow things like BlackHat, DefCon or even Hope. But besides conferences like those and ethical.hackers, there are things out there like the Thawte contests and the almighty 0Day Pwn2Own. $10,000 prize and the pirates’ booty of the conquered territory. This time around the zero day initiative made a tempting offer (that I truly wish my team was prepared for so I too could have participated) to take down 3 laptops – the Catch? A Macbook Air, A Linux Box, and A Vista Box. All three were up to date laptops.
Day 0, for some of you that’s Day 1, but for the point of it all, rockets launch at the end of the countdown, not on 1. 0Day exploits had to be used. Then the rules differed a bit. Day 1 (day 2), Charlie Miller of ISE (whom I should’ve applied to last summer) took down the macbook air in 2 minutes. Now, for all you mac enthusiasts out there, why the heck would you want one now? Go buy the x300 I was talking about before, it’s better anyway. Back to the current topic- Hacker Glory. Sure, if the week was longer, the linux and the vista laptops would have been exploited too, but that happens on a daily basis (and there probably was lack in preparation for those), hell, I would have just brought stuff to take out the air myself.
I give Charlie Miller props. But I give his coworkers props as well. ISE, the guys who found flaws in the electronic voting machines. I’ve got to hand it to them, though, America won this contest.
I’ll retire and hope that ISE is still around to hire me. – Maryland Represent.
Macs are Unhackable” – 2 minutes. Haha. Glory is the fall of a Mac.
ambiguiccoherence said,
April 3, 2008 at 1:04 am
I’m going to further add a quote from David Maynor’s blog:
I have a different theory: it was the easiest. With Vista and Linux correctly implementing technologies Apple botched like ASLR it is the naturally easiest target. If you want an analogy, it is kind of like the slow Antelope that has been separated from the herd by predators.
robinton said,
April 3, 2008 at 11:39 pm
From the ZDnet blogs and other places, apparently the Vista machine was taken down by a flaw in Flash; theoretically the Linux box could have been taken down with the same thing, but the rules prohibited re-using an exploit.