Mac and Vista hacked, but Linux remained secure in hacking competition

[Game_boy]

http://www.cio.com/article/324313/With_Vista_Breached_Linux_Unbeaten_in_Hacking_Contest

At a recent hacking competition at the CanSecWest conference, entrants were tasked to hack into laptops at first remotely, and then as the prize money diminished they could have further access to the computers. There were three laptops: a Macbook Air running fully patched Mac OS X 10.5 and two generic x86 PCs: one running fully patched Windows Vista SP1 and the other running the Linux distribution Ubuntu 7.10 fully patched. The exploit used had to be previously unknown.

The first to be taken down, on the second day, was the Mac, exploting a Safari vulnerability. Next, on the third day, the Vista laptop was hacked using a Java vulnerability. At the end of the competition the Linux laptop remained secure. Both the Safari and Java exploits may turn out to be be cross-platform, but secure operating systems should run all applications at the user level and no user application should have administrator access. Therefore, the vulnerabilities must have exploited an OS as well as an application security flaw.