Mac Hack Attack

[Toby]

VANCOUVER, B.C. -- It took Charlie Miller only two minutes on Thursday to claim top honors in a contest that asked hackers to exploit security weaknesses on laptop computers. Believe it or not, his victim was a Mac. full story...

[Cleo]

He did have direct access to the computer so I don't see why this would be so surprising. Before that he was only given access through the network and was unable to hack in.

[Toby]

No, I think you misuderstood. He never touched the machine, only had someone use the machine to visit a malicious web page, which then allowed him to access the machine via the network.

[Cleo]

I still don't think it really means anything.

You could just as easily make a AppleScript that ran the command cd/ rm -rf and have someone go to a web page to load it. (I may not have that exactly right)

You can hack anything if you or someone else at the machine has physical access to it.

[Toby]

Originally Posted by Cleo

You can hack anything if you or someone else at the machine has physical access to it.

Someone else you say? Such as a naive user that goes to web page looking for something else?

[Simon]

Nice work from the guy who hacked the iPhone (first).

Macs get hacked all the time. Mostly by the teams at Apple who are always banging on them to see what they can make them do that they're not supposed to do. That's one of the reasons why we get (automatic) regular updates to the system and core applications. We'll probably have another one of those soon.

This wasn't really a 2-minute hack, as I'm sure the code executed in only a few seconds. And they never mentioned how long it took him to write the code he put on the webpage that ran the attack.

I'd be interested to find out if the Mac was hacked 'as shipped' or was the latest security update run first.

Does anyone know what happened the next day with the attacks on the Linux and Vista machines/systems?

[digifan]

Woohoo, great news.. not.