Ubuntu laptop last standing in hacking contest

Makes it through 3 days of attacks

Ubuntu Laptop Passes Hacking Test 0

31 March 2008 11:25 GMT / By Katie Scott

While the MacBook Air lasted just 2 minutes, a laptop from Ubuntu has withstood 3 days of hack attacks by some of the world's best at a conference in the US.

The Ubuntu machine was the only machine to hold out during the CanSecWest security conference, where hackers are pitted against each other to find undiscovered flaws in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The Leopard OS X 10.5.2 was first to fall, after a hacker gained access just 2 minutes into the second day of the contest.

According to online reports, the problem was a flaw in Safari.

On day 3 of the competition, the contestants were allowed to try and break into machines using any "popular" piece of software.

And it was Adobe's Flash that proved to be Vista's downfall.

Adobe has been notified of the flaw, while the hacker gets to keep the Fujitsu laptop running Vista Ultimate SP1 that he managed to break in to, as well as pocketing a $5000 prize.

But the Ubuntu 7.10 Linux machine flummoxed everyone.



Comments

  • The person who cracked the Mac in two minutes had almost certainly practised at home first (maybe it took them 2 months to find the problem in the first place, but once found it only takes them 2 minutes to do the crack).

    So the time taken to crack one of the machines is no indication of how secure a system is. Obviously as Ubuntu wasn't cracked it is obviously quite secure.
     Posted by Mike, UK
  • Your form is really badly designed. The captcha is sometimes unreadable... ditch it.

    Anyway here's my comment:

    The person who cracked the Mac in two minutes had almost certainly practised at home first (maybe it took them 2 months to find the problem in the first place, but once found it only takes them 2 minutes to do the crack).

    So the time taken to crack one of the machines is no indication of how secure a system is. Obviously as Ubuntu wasn't cracked it is obviously quite secure.
     Posted by Mike, UK
  • Dumb comment said twice. Posted by Al, UK
  • Dumber comment said just once. Impressive. Posted by Virgin, UK

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