The IT Nerd

It’s day one at the CanSec Pwn2Own hacking contest and the big boys are falling like stock prices on Wall St. Microsoft took the biggest hit of the day when a Sony Vaio running Windows 7 and the allegedly unhackable Internet Explorer 8 were hacked by a hacker named “Nils” who gets to keep the Sony Vaio as well as pocketing $5000 in cash.

You can expect that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is regretting that he said that Internet Explorer 8 had  “protection that no other browser can match.” Of course the fact that IE 8 got hacked right before it was to be released to the public isn’t good either.

“Nils” later went on to hack Safari (Although he wasn’t the first to do that… More on that in a second) and Firefox later in the day earning mad props from those in attendance. The first person to hack Safari however was Charlie Miller who has “Pwned” Apple in the past. He hacked Safari and took over the Macbook that it was running on seconds into the competition to net him both the Macbook and $10000 cash.

You can bet that “The Steve” is somewhere saying “Curses! Pwned again!”

All the participants who successfully hack something have to sign NDA’s so that the companies who get “Pwned” can fix the issues before exploits appear. So you can expect to see a flurry of patches and updates hitting the streets shortly. Oh and by the way, Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian, iPhone and BlackBerry smart phones are all on the table as hacking targets. So you can expect the fun to continue for the next few days.

This entry was posted on March 19, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Firefox, hacking, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Safari. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.