Contest Over: MacBook Air Hacked In 2 Minutes

RangerXML said:
I don't use iTunes for my iPod, I use Winamp, lol. Donno if it works with an iPhone though, I was able to rip all my friends music off of his using Winamp.
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Oooh... I'll have to take a look at that.


Having said all that, did the contest just end as soon as the Mac fell (in that division) or did they continue to find the 2nd and 3rd place?
 
Oh sure, dodge the issue by pointing out non-issues. Face it, you guys ARE zealots, knowing how insecured your OS is, yet preaching it to the mass in sheer and blissful ignorance. That's zealotry if I ever heard one.
 
griffinhart said:
Part of the problem is that it may not even be something the user can avoid. If the site they are directed to is compromised, which isn't that far off of an idea, then the malicious code could be injected into what would otherwise be a normal web site and then hitting the unprotected safari user.
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I was really shocked a few years ago when I (intentionally) went to a website to see if it would shut down my XP rig over IE. Within seconds of clicking over I lost control of the machine and it reset. I thought it was pretty neat, actually. :)

The situation you described could easily happen, but I guess that's why regular security updates are a fact of life.
 
It is funny. I haven't seen so many Mac users with panties in a knot since the MS investment, although the switch to Intel came close. Every single message board i've read with this story has Mac fans twisting logic around the fact that OS X still has simple browser-based holes.

It's not like the MOAB didn't demonstrate that OS X wasn't somehow inherently secure when Apple doesn't really seem to care about it.
 
Kind of funny that Engadget HAD to print the outcome of that event since they brought it up (probably expecting it to be Vista to fall first). ...and as soon as they released one of the few negative articles about Apple that they've printed in a while, Apple ads/banners covered the site claiming superiority. You HAVE to love seeing "Vista, one of the biggest blunders in history" as you're reading that a Mac got hacked first. ...doesn't really promote much credit to their journalistic integrity to me.
 
Pink - I started reading through the comments in the Engadget article after you mentioned it. Some really good comments here among the usual fanboy crying on both sides: http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/pwn-2-own-over-macbook-air-gets-seized-in-2-minutes-flat/

Among them is are quotes from an interview with the hacker:

Miller didn't create this exploit in two minutes. He'd spent a month with a macbook and safari and his exploit developing it and preparing it, just like they did with the iPhone and iPod Touch. So I can jailbreak my iPod in two minutes - that doesn't mean the iPod was jailbroken in two minutes, if you see what I mean. Miller felt he could have done the same thing to either of the other OSs, too.

"We could have chosen any of those three but had to make a judgement call on which would be the easiest and decided it would be Leopard," Miller said.

Why was it the easiest? well:

"But hacking Leopard was not meant as an attack on Apple, according to Miller: "I use a MacBook all the time and that's what I used in the contest to attack the MacBook Air. I like Macs. That's the reason I went for it; it's in my best interest for them to be as secure as possible."

He has his macbook with him 24 hours a day to hack at. Opportunity.
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TLDR - He wanted a free Macbook Air :/
 
pxc said:
It is funny. I haven't seen so many Mac users with panties in a knot since the MS investment, although the switch to Intel came close. Every single message board i've read with this story has Mac fans twisting logic around the fact that OS X still has simple browser-based holes.
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Anyone not wearing blinders knows that there are browser vulnerabilities in Safari just like there are in every other web browser. There is a reason for those semi-regular security updates.

Handing over admin/root access right from the start is the main issue with Windows security compared to Linux and OS X, although that is something that Vista, and even XP in the last two years, has gone a long way to correcting (albeit with lots of notifications, but for the general user population I'll take it).
 
Ok, just found out that the hack was via a 3rd party Java exploit in Safari. That is really annoying because the last Java update took forever to be released for it.

Anyone here on OS X, stick with this: http://caminobrowser.org/
 
someone actually posted this on slashdot

"We Love Microsoft and Hate All Things Apple."


i mean dammmn
 
Martyr said:
someone actually posted this on slashdot

"We Love Microsoft and Hate All Things Apple."


i mean dammmn
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http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2008/03/18/true_enough_excerpt_2/index.html
Tech columnists Mossberg and Pogue don't claim to be objective. They're critics, and they trade in that slipperiest of all media productions: personal opinion. At the same time, each is unfailingly ethical and intellectually honest. Their articles brim with justification. ...

If you're non-partisan, this is all you could want from a tech reviewer, and Mossberg and Pogue's style likely accounts for their enormous popularity. But many fans of Apple often seem to want more. They care little for honest opinion. They want to pick up the paper and see in it a reflection of their own nearly religious zeal for the thing they love. They don't want a review. They want a hagiography.
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I thought they winner was supposed to get 20k? Whats this 10k+laptop thing?
 
9mmx19 said:
I thought they winner was supposed to get 20k? Whats this 10k+laptop thing?
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The 20,000 is if you are successful the first day, it gets cut in half with each passing day. No one even attempted the first day apparently.
 
rofl it begins.. the zealots are scrambling to find any information they can to defend their precious Apple.

Face it Serpico, your Mac LOST.
 
Serpico said:
Pink - I started reading through the comments in the Engadget article after you mentioned it. Some really good comments here among the usual fanboy crying on both sides: http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/pwn-2-own-over-macbook-air-gets-seized-in-2-minutes-flat/

Among them is are quotes from an interview with the hacker:



TLDR - He wanted a free Macbook Air :/
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It's far from a scientific and controlled expirement. Although, I do think that Apple deserves this as kharma is coming back to bite them and their deceptive (and annoying) advertising practices.
 
Azhar said:
rofl it begins.. the zealots are scrambling to find any information they can to defend their precious Apple.

Face it Serpico, your Mac LOST.
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Yes, and my PCs have been losing that battle for years now. Plus if you paid attention you'd see my post in the other PWN 2 WIN thread from yesterday saying that OS X was going to get compromised first. There is no denial here so what's your point? I use and like both for different reasons.

I seriously don't get your rabid pro-MS/anti-anything-else fanboyism.
 
9mmx19 said:
I thought they winner was supposed to get 20k? Whats this 10k+laptop thing?
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20K is only if you win the challenge from the first day, which is remote hacking with no admin privileges out of the gate. Nobody was able to do it remotely on the first day so the prize was cut down. Day 2 rules loosen to allow local access with default OS configurations and bundled software, day 3 rules further loosen to allow local access and third party software. Each following day means that the prize money is cut down because the parameters get simpler and simpler from a security standpoint.
 
Wow people need to get a life!! So what if a mac got hacked???? If I said I owned a Macbook pro would that make you think less of me as a person??? Since when does the type of computer you own define you as a person.

By the way, typing this on a windows box.
 
Azhar said:
rofl it begins.. the zealots are scrambling to find any information they can to defend their precious Apple.

Face it Serpico, your Mac LOST.
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PS - The "precious PC" in my sig destroys yours. And let's not even talk about those awful Samsungs... :p
 
G1BSON said:
Wow people need to get a life!! So what if a mac got hacked???? If I said I owned a Macbook pro would that make you think less of me as a person??? Since when does the type of computer you own define you as a person.

By the way, typing this on a windows box.
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Don't you dare say that you like using operating systems outside of Windows. If you do you're a deluded fanboy. :rolleyes:
 
Latest update:
2:30pm PST Update: Its been two hours so far, and both Vista and Ubuntu laptops are still standing. Stay tuned...
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Note: today is with popular software installed and not just out of the box software as yesterday. Also, the Mac is not a target today since it was hacked yesterday.
 
so they got the mac in ten mins on day two. how is the vista and linux laptops holding up?
 
I actually love using Leopard, but I also like my xp to get my game on. Cant we all just get along! :cool: Its just funny to me when people scream AHHHHH APPLE ZEALOT, when they themselves are raging windowz freaks.
 
G1BSON said:
I actually love using Leopard, but I also like my xp to get my game on. Cant we all just get along! :cool: Its just funny to me when people scream AHHHHH APPLE ZEALOT, when they themselves are raging windowz freaks.
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It is called irony, it is hilarious, and it completely goes over the heads of some of the people in these threads.
 
griffinhart said:
Latest update:


Note: today is with popular software installed and not just out of the box software as yesterday. Also, the Mac is not a target today since it was hacked yesterday.
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way to go for both. i still think they should have left the mac in play tho.
 
haha, i knew i would be right, and now you will never learn what they did and Apple will keep it HUSH HUSH or not blame the OS "OSX is stable!!! " ya but apple makes safari.. haha
 
Not to be a dick but how long would it take for XP to get hacked.

I think it would have been hacked from day one.
 
Maybe early XP, but while Vista is more secure than XP by a long shot, SP2 is pretty fortified against outside attacks.
 
not being a dick but they are comparing the most recent OS';s from each side and yes they should of left OSX in it.
 
griffinhart said:
Maybe early XP, but while Vista is more secure than XP by a long shot, SP2 is pretty fortified against outside attacks.
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I agree. It involved a lot of extra software running and extra steps but XP has been incredibly secure for the last two years now.
 
This reminds me of the launch of Safari on Windows. First all the Mac fanbois were jumping up and down about how awesome Safari was, and then the beta hit. Next came tons of zero day exploits, articles and posts on how terrible the font rendering was next to cleartype, followed up by discoveries that Safari wasn't handling javascript events correctly (stuff like executing onload before the page actually loaded and crap), and therefore wasn't nearly as fast as the Apple "tests" claimed (AFAIK, Opera was still faster, and I can't remember if Firefox was too or not).

Now, here we are, with IE proving to be more secure than Safari.... Ouch.
 
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