My 2 Cents: This is for all you MAC lovers out there that always touted how secure MAC was…not that it was not true at the time but more to the fact that no-one wanted to hack the mac, because there was no reason.  Now with the growth of the NEW Leopard, that is no longer the case and now MAC feels the cat & mouse game that Microsoft has had to deal with (2 mins…too funny) being the most widely used OS… 

The funny thing is that the one technology that has always been secure and widely adopted by manufactures is LINUX and with their new focus on user experience (Beryl / xFusion) they really might start having a chance at take a larger piece of that pie ;O)

Mac OS X’s reputation for security was tarnished Thursday when a team of researchers from Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) managed to hack a MacBook Air in two minutes using a zero-day vulnerability in Apple’s Safari 3.1 Web browser. The ISE security researchers — Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel — were participating in the “PWN to OWN” competition at the CanSecWest security conference, which began Wednesday in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Pwn” is computer gaming slang for “own,” as in conquer. The “p” typo serves to heighten the humiliation of defeat by emphasizing that the loss came at the hands of a youth who can’t even spell or type correctly. The term has also come to be used in security circles.

Contest participants had their choice of trying to hack an Apple MacBook Air running OS X 10.5.2, a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10, or a Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1. During the first day, when attacks were limited to network attacks on the operating system, no one managed to compromise any of the systems. That changed Thursday when attacks on default client-side applications — Web browser, e-mail, IM — were allowed. The ISE team won $10,000 from security firm TippingPoint Technologies for compromising the MacBook Air. The undisclosed vulnerability in Safari 3.1 has been shown to Apple and no further information about it will be revealed until Apple can issue an update, TippingPoint said.

Source: CRN, InfoWeek

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