by Edward
25 March 2009 09:18
A German computer science student has hacked the three main browsers(IE8, Firefox and Safari), winning $15,000, showing that none of them is completely safe as we think they are.
At the annual Pwn2Own at the
CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, Charlie Miller hacked Apple's Safari browser in just seconds, but the others didn't last greatly longer. As Ryan Naraine says at ZD Net:
A security researcher named "Nils" (he declined to provide his full name for the press) performed a clean
drive-by download attack against the world's most widely used browser to take full control of a Sony Vaio machine running Windows 7.
He won a cash prize and also got to keep the hardware. Details of the vulnerability issue, which was described by contest main sponsor TippingPoint ZDI as a "brilliant IE8 bug!" are being kept under wraps for now.
Nils also pwned Safari and later, Firefox, winning a total of $15,000 plus 2 computers. Not a bad for a day's work for a young guy like him. Heise Online says Nils is "a 25 year old computer science student from the University of Oldenburg, in Germany".