Hacker Picks An Apple MacBook In Two Minutes

A team of security researchers from Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) has won $10,000 for hacking a MacBook Air. It was done in two minutes using a vulnerability in the default Safari browser.

The defenses of MacBook Air were breached within two minutes. Thankfully it was all a part of a recent security expo contest. It was all a contest, but the results will give Mac's reputation for security a bloody nose. To top it all, the MacBook was hacked using a zero-day vulnerability in Apple's Safari 3.1 Web browser. During the CanSecWest conference's "PWN 2 OWN" competition, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, participants were expected to hack into one of three notebooks, and read the contents of a file using only an original zero-day attack. The laptop choices in the test were - Apple MacBook Air running OS X 10.5.2, a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10, or a Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1. No one was able to defeat any of the systems on Wednesday, the first day of the contest, when hacks were limited to over-the-network techniques on the operating systems themselves. But on the second day, the rules changed to allow attacks delivered by tricking someone to visit a maliciously crafted Web site, or open an e-mail. Hackers were also allowed to target 'default installed client-side applications' such as browsers. An award of $10,000 plus an Air is said to have gone to Charlie Miller, who broke into the computer within two minutes. He accomplished this by redirecting the web browser to a site preconfigured with 'attack codes' set to exploit the vulnerabilities of the browser. The speed of the hack is considered especially impressive given that last year, a hack for the MacBook Pro took nine hours. This year it was just two minutes. At the end of Thursday's competition, two PC notebooks -- a Sony Vaio and Fujitsu U810 -- had yet to be cracked, according to observers. Apple has yet to respond on the results. As Charles Miller and his team walks away with the prize, Apple has some serious work up its sleeve. It's not that the computer was hacked, but the speed at which it was accomplished. Vista was the expected one to break, but the OS X beat it to the post by a mile. And Charles Miller seems to be picking on Apple, as he was also one of the first guys to hack the iPhone on its release. Thankfully, he is a bonafide researcher.