Charlie Miller, who hacked a MacBook Air in two minutes at CanSecWest, says he attacked the Mac OS because it’s more vulnerable than Windows or Linux.
The security researcher who walked away with $10,000 Thursday by hacking a MacBook Air in less than two minutes said he chose to attack Apple Inc. ‘s operating system for one simple reason.
“It was the easiest one of the three,” said Charlie Miller , a principal analyst with Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), a Baltimore-based security consultancy. “We wanted to spend as little time as possible coming up with an exploit, so we picked Mac OS X .”
On Thursday afternoon, Miller breached a MacBook Air , one of three laptops up for grabs in the “PWN 2 OWN” hacker challenge at CanSecWest, a security conference that wraps up today in Vancouver, B.C. For his efforts, he was got the computer and a $10,000 cash prize.
The MacBook Air was running the most current version of Mac OS X, 10.5.2 with all the latest security patches applied. The other two computers, a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10 and a Fujitsu U810 notebook running Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, were also up-to-date and fully patched.
“We sat down about three weeks ago and decided we wanted to throw our hats into the ring,” said Miller, referring to himself and ISE colleagues. “It took us a couple of days to find something, then the rest of the week to work up an exploit and test it.
“It took us maybe a week altogether,” Miller said.
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Tags: Apple, Hackers, Mac Air, Security, Vista, Windows Vista
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