Apple MacBook Air Hacked In 120 Seconds

Cryos - 49 days 11 hours ago

why is everyone so amazed with the speed in which they hacked it? They obviously already had a program written and uploaded that would exploit the safari weakness before the competition began. It's not like they started from scratch.

Also, this isn't a problem inherent to the macbook air, but the safari browser. It's why I use Firefox. Now, if they hacked it through the Air's ability to connect to another computer to use it's DVD drive, that's something else......

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Percy - 49 days 6 hours ago

During the event you had to find a way to execute a code remotly in a way that has never been done before even if they had it written before hand how could they know that it would work. they had no clue going into it what versions of software or anti piracy the computer would be running.

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Kholinar - 49 days 20 hours ago

If there's a hole, there's a hole.

Last year proves your theory wrong. Macs had a far smaller install base and still held out far longer as did linux.

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The Lazy One - 49 days 17 hours ago

Reword that. It makes no sense the way you said it.

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mighty_douche - 49 days 19 hours ago

Well unless you hand it over to a team of haxors you should be alright. Either way, while its embarrassing for Apple this would of helped them to establish the "hole" in their security and stick a plaster over the sucker before the problem becomes more well known, in certain circles (or forums lol).

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Kholinar - 49 days 19 hours ago

Yeah, it should also say "Apple MacBook Air Hacked in One Day and 120 seconds."

This was the second day/phase of the challenge, where the hacker had permission to direct a user to their website in order to install a hack. Today they install third-party software and see how it goes.

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Adamalicious - 49 days 17 hours ago

10.5.3 is a pretty large security update - it's currently in testing and should be along very soon.

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Kholinar - 49 days 17 hours ago

But... but... but...

Have you even researched botnets?

"MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan quotes $5,000 per day for a botnet of 50,000 to 70,000 PCs in his description of the wars between botnet owners trying to steal each other’s machines ( http://redtape.msnbc.com/20...

So 70000 machines amount to 1.825 million per year for botnet operators.

Now, the apple install-base: http://www.appleinsider.com... 22 million in early 2007.

Let's say 5 percent of that is hackable. 1 million macs waiting there easy to hack... that's $5 billion that botnet operators are passing up just because Windows has a larger install base? I don't think the Russian mob and others that run these things are that stupid.

"Vint Cerf and other pioneers were quoted in an article by the BBC saying that 150 million of the 600 million machines are bots and the situation is an epidemic." http://advosys.ca/viewpoint...

So 1/4 of pcs are owned. Believe me, there are tons of people that would die to grab a million macs.

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The Lazy One - 49 days 17 hours ago

So the thousand stop telling the million every 5 seconds how much better their security is?

Do I get a prize?

edit: @9.1, I think you missed his point. Why hack those 1 million macs, when you can hack 10 million PCs in the same time?

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Kholinar - 49 days 16 hours ago

And you missed mine.

If you have both keys and one gets you $100 billion and the other gets you five billion, you open the 100 billion door but only an idiot would throw away $5 billion. You open both.

Even a tiny bot-net is extremely lucrative. That's the point. If macs are easily hacked, then only idiots would ignore the money they could make.

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The Lazy One - 49 days 15 hours ago

You don't have the time or resources to do everything. It's opportunity cost. You can either open a million doors on PC, or you can open the thousand on mac and only 800 thousand on PC.

That's basic econ. for every unit of costs you put in, you get greater gains on PC hacks/greater numbers affected. There is an opportunity cost on every decision.

I could use your example to say, why don't I get 5 million jobs work each for one hour on April 29th from 9-10 at minimum wage, and be ready to retire by may.

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Kholinar - 49 days 14 hours ago

Yep. Finding an exploit (that one lone programmer found in a couple of weeks) and running an exploit on a few dozen sites is exactly like working 5 million jobs. One person with limited resources found it for the prize of $10000. You're telling me that the best bot programmers in the world wouldn't do it for even a 1% exploit? $1 Billion dollars a year, but they won't look, while some anonymous guy does it for $10k. The guy must have been an idiot. He could have easily hacked Vista in 60 seconds and walked away with the prize.

It takes no more work if the exploit is just as available. In addition, macs will run better than the majority of the machines in their botnets. Most are 95, 98, and Me machines. Enabling more spam, ddos, etc.

There's extreme competition for the Windows bots. Most are so easy to exploit that they change hands regularly, thus losing whatever investment you had. Much easier to exploit, then lock down the Mac.

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350ZRunner - 49 days 3 hours ago

I only gave one reason PC security is so frequently more compromised but the underlying idea remains the same. It's all about time: There's only so much of it and simple human behavior dictates that you will spend the resources you have to obtain the greatest return on your time investment... Which in this case means going after PCs as opposed to Macs.

Another issue entirely comes from the fact that the PC is far more widely available which means two things: First of all, there are more people familiar with the systems, security and methods of PC operation and as such there are more people that know how to compromise them. Second of all a lot of the ground work in compromising PC security is already done due to the tens of thousands of people working on it.

My statement came in and of the fact that anytime a bug, security problem or virus for a PC crops up the Mac idiots start giggling like this isn't a problem they have and my point was that they don't have these problems largely because there are a lot less people working against the Mac and not because the Mac is oh so much better. If the situation were reversed and Mac's were popular while PCs were not then you would see the same thing: PC users giggling at the problems Mac has.

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The Lazy One - 49 days 13 hours ago

MOZILLA?!

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