Leopard hacked fastest in contest

MacBook Air pwned in less than 2 minutes

28 March 2008 11:28 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

At the CanSecWest security conference's annual PWN 2 OWN hacking contest Leopard was the operating system to fall fastest this year.

The competition saw hackers pitted against three laptops running Vista Ultimate SP1, Leopard OS X 10.5.2 and Ubuntu 7.10 in order to discover which OS was the most vulnerable.

It was Apple's new top of the range MacBook Air running a fully-patched version of Leopard that succumbed in under 2 minutes.

Security researcher Charlie Miller used a technique described as similar to a phishing attack, which involved clicking a link to a website containing malicious code, which allowed him to remotely access the machine via a flaw in Safari.

Miller gets to keep the Air, and wins the £5000 prize purse from sponsor Tipping Point, who has notified Apple of the flaw.