MacBook Air security hacked at CanSecWest

Oh dear, it had to happen: security experts and hackers at the CanSecWest security conference are talking about just one event – that a MacBook Air was the first of three platforms successfully hacked in the PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.

The contest saw former National Security Agency employee and researcher Charlie Miller saunter across to the Mac to run his exploit, which possibly took advantage of a security flaw in Safari.  Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, each running a different operating system (Mac OS X, Windows Vista and Linux). Was it fair?

The deal is that the first researcher to successfully hack each computer walks home with the laptop and some prize money. While the Mac was the first system to fall to the hacker attacks, it’s expected the other two systems will be PWNed later today. The company behind the competition, Tipping Point, quickly moved to notify Apple of the vulnerability, with Apple’s Mac OS X team now scrambling to close the gap, reports claim. 

Also, note that CanSecWest’s sponsors include Microsoft but no Linux Companies or Apple.