Vista Falls - Linux Is Last Man Standing

At the Pwn to Own contest at the CanSecWest security conference, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Vista's security defences falls to the test hackers. At the end, a Sony Vaio running the Ubuntu OS remains 'un-hacked' and unconquered.

A software that was developed as just a hobby is the last man standing at the Pwn to Own contest at CanSecWest. As reported here earlier, Pwn to Own is a hacking competition held annually at the CanSecWest Security conference. It is supposedly the world's most advanced conference focusing on applied digital security, and brings the industry luminaries together in a relaxed environment which promotes collaboration and social networking. It is held over three days and is the focus of all those interested in computer security. Hackers are welcomed. Within the conference, the PWN 2 OWN hacking contest is a much anticipated event. For the uninitiated, 'Pwn' is a computer slang which means, domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet gaming culture. This time around teams competed in a 'race' to hack three laptops, Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook Air. The annual computer security show organizers had offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a "zero day" attack. The Sony Vaio was running on an Ubuntu OS, Fujitsu U810 on Microsoft's Vista SP1 and the MacBook Air on the Mac OS X 10.5.2. 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 on Thursday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct other attacks on the machines following normal human user trends like visiting Web sites or opening e-mail messages. The MacBook was the first to go on Thursday. Charlie Miller took the Mac and $10,000 after about two minutes work using a vulnerability in Apple's Safari browser. (Apple has also just started to ship Safari to some Windows machines, with its iTunes update service.) On Friday, the rules were relaxed even further. Hackers could target any third party software albeit only the 'popular' and certified ones. By evening the hackers got to Vista ultimately. After two days of work, Shane Macaulay finally cracked the tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista by exploiting a hitherto unknown flaw in the Adobe Flash software. His spoils, the Fujitsu and $5000. Not bad for three days of work. In terms of hours, it took 7 to hack into Vista. And for all of us who snob our noses at Linux/Ubuntu, here's news. At the end of three days, the Sony Vaio running the Ubuntu OS went home undefeated. According to the participants, writing code to break into it was too much of hard labour. The vulnerabilities of both systems have been disclosed confidentially to the respective parties (Apple and Adobe). No information on the specific problem will be available till the patches are released.