08/03/2007, 10:15am, EDT
Friday, August 3rd
MacBook Wi-Fi "hack" wins "Pwnie" award
Maynor installed software that never shipped with Apple's notebook and compromised that software's security to gain unfettered access to the MacBook in question as part of his demonstration that Mac OS X and Mac users in particular are not immune to security threats. The researcher was criticized by industry peers for using a modified system to perform a public demonstration, though other security professionals did remind users that no one is safe from persistent, skilled attackers.
The researcher's flaw did work on previous versions of Mac OS X, but Apple quickly noted that all Apple owners who kept their systems up to date were immune to the security threat demoed by Maynor.
In related news, ZDNet reports that the OpenBSD team won the award for the most spectacular "mishandling" of a critical security vulnerability after refusing to acknowledge the bug as such. The team released a "reliability fix" before Core Security developed proof-of-concept code to demonstrate remote code execution just one week later.
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Vista was probably hacked 2 to 3 times while I was typing this this.
This isn't even newsworthy other than the fact that they actually gave him an award for something he didn't really earn.
Why again do we care?