Hacker breaks into Mac at security conference
In winning the contest, he exposed a hole in Safari, Apple’s browser. "Currently, every copy of OS X out there now is vulnerable to this," says Sean Comeau, one of the organisers of CanSecWest.
The conference organisers decided to offer the contest in part to draw attention to possible security shortcomings in Macs.
"You see a lot of people running OS X saying it is so secure and, frankly, Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has," says Dragos Ruiu, the principal organiser of security conferences including CanSecWest.
Initially, contestants were invited to try to access one of two Macs through a wireless access point while the Macs had no programs running.
No attackers managed to do so, and so conference organisers allowed participants to try to get in through the browser by sending URLs via e-mail.
Dino Di Zovie, who lives in New York, sent along a URL that exposed the hole.
Since the contest was only open to attendees in Vancouver, he sent it to a friend who was at the conference and forwarded it on.
The URL opened a blank page but exposed a vulnerability in input handling in Safari, Comeau says. An attacker could use the vulnerability in a number of ways, but Di Zovie used it to open a back door that gave him access to anything on the computer, Comeau adds.
The vulnerability will not be published. 3Com’s TippingPoint division, which put up the cash prize, will handle disclosing it to Apple.
The prize for the contest was originally one of the Macs. But TippingPoint put up the cash award, which may have spurred a wider interest in the contest.
One reason Macs have not been much of a target for hackers is that there are fewer to attack, says Terri Forslof, manager of security response for TippingPoint.
"It is an incentive issue. The Mac is not as widely deployed of a platform as say Windows," she adds. In this case, the cash may have provided motivation.
The contest was a chance for hackers to demonstrate techniques they may have boasted about. "I hear a lot of people bragging about how easy it is to break into Macs," Ruiu says.
Some attendees didn’t think it was a coincidence that late on Thursday last week Apple released a patch for 25 vulnerabilities in OS X.
Macs have not been targets for hackers and malicious code writers to nearly the degree that Windows machines have historically.
That’s in part because there are fewer Macs in use, thus making the potential impact of malicious code smaller than on the more widely used PCs.
Also, Apple is "extremely litigious when people do find stuff," notes Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD project leader and an attendee at the conference.
He suspects that this will backfire on Apple, which could begin to "look evil" if hackers begin to publish potentially threatening letters from the company.
Computing SA
Loading ...