Hacker competition exposes zero-day attacks on Safari, IE8, and Firefox

The third Pwn2Own hacker technology competition initiated by Tipping Point kicked off on March 13, March 18, us time. In the first day of the competition, contestants need to try to break mainstream browsers (IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) with complete patches and smart phones (Blackberry, Android, iPhone, nokia/Symbian, Windows Mobile ). As a three-Day reward, Zero Day Initiative will provide browser vulnerability discoverers with $5000 and a free computer, the discovery of vulnerabilities in smartphones will receive a reward of $10000 and the one-year right to use the smartphones.

In the first day of the Pwn2Own competition, the security of smartphones stood the test, while mainstream browsers were not so lucky. The two winners Charlie Miller and Nils broke Safari (twice), IE8, and Firefox.

Last year, one of the winners, Charlie Miller, broke Mac OS X's Safari browser again in just two minutes during the first day of the browser attack competition.

Charlie Miller turned Safari into shame again

Another contestant, Nils, successfully broke the security protection of IE8 on the Windows 7 platform, including the latest protection technology adopted by Microsoft-DEP (Data Execution Prevention, Data Execution Protection) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization, Address Space Layout Randomization), this action makes the security of IE8 attract more and more attention, in the end, Nils won the latest Sony Vaio notebook and a $5000 bonus.

Nils and Sony Vaio

However, the first two surprises are just the beginning of a good show. Shortly after that, Nils once again made Pwn2Own's participants boil. He quickly won the Apple Safari browser with a vulnerability in a plotting tool in Safari, and won the $5000 prize and Apple's white paper here. After successfully breaking through the two mainstream browsers, Nils cutting down the FireFox browser. It is reported that in the second day of the Pwn2Own competition, Nils will challenge Google Chrome, and is likely to become the latest 0-day founder of four mainstream browsers.

1. Google: All Windows systems should be able to uninstall IE
2. Opera Turbo 10.0 Build 1355 Alpha released
3. Windows 7 became the target of the Pwn2own hacker challenge
4. Safari 4 is a key target for hackers