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A hacker has won $10,000 for successfully breaking into an Apple Macbook Pro as part of a contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.
Contestants were invited to try to access one of two MacBooks through a wireless access point while no programmes were running. After it became apparent no one was able to do so conference organisers allowed participants to try to get in through the browser by sending URLs via e-mail, which allowed New Yorker Dino Di Zovie to open a back door that gave him access to anything on the computer
In winning the competition Di Zovie has exposed a hole in Apple’s Safari web browser. "Currently, every copy of OS X out there now is vulnerable to this," said Sean Comeau, one of the organisers of CanSecWest according to Computerworld.
The organisers of the conference put forward the challenge to draw attention to possible security shortcomings in Macs. "You see a lot of people running OS X saying it’s so secure and frankly Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has," said Dragos Ruiu, the principal organiser of security conferences including CanSecWest
For obvious reasons, the vulnerability won’t be published. 3Com’s TippingPoint division, which put up the cash prize, will disclose it to Apple.
